Dr. Cheney is attempting to answer the following question: What can we learn from the residents about their experience in living with asthma, and can this help us understand the disease?
There are very few hospitals in the area around the Salton Sea--only two in Imperial County and three in the Coachella Valley.
The "Disparities in Environmental Exposures and Health Impacts" project has four goals:
New and Alamo Rivers - transboundary movement
This book builds on environmental justice research and concepts. In a reflection over the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, Kim Fortun (2012) proposed the beginning of a “late industrialism” era where disasters would be normalized as a result of conflicting information from the media and “experts” making it impossible for individuals to make informed decisions on politics and to demand environmental regulation. Bullard and Wright (2009) and Pellow (2018) proposed ethnic minorities and groups from lower socio-economic status are disproportionately burdened by toxic pollution; polluted communities face an uphill environmental justice battle against powerful corporations and local politicians to prove this disproportional toxic exposure. Brown (1993) and Allen (2003) proposed “popular epidemiology,” where communities would upkeep with their own health research, as an important way to include the community in research that would benefit them; with the benefit of having multiple different perspectives addressing one issue. Citizen science, coined by Alan Irwin (1995) is a popular concept that enforces community-based participatory research. Pellow (2018) proposed “critical environmental justices,'' defining it in four pillars: (1) “intersectional forms of inequality and oppression,” (2) “the role of scale in the production and possible resolution of environmental injustices,” (3) “recognition that social inequalities are deeply embedded in state power,” (4) “indispensability, arguing that “excluded, marginalized, and othered populations, beings, and things ... must not be viewed as expendable but rather as indispensable to our collective futures'' (Pellow 2018, 26).
Thom and Mah (2022) build on the importance of community inclusion in research. Although there are scholars interested in coming up with solutions on social-environmental problems. The community rarely benefits from the results of that research because there’s a huge disconnect between academia and neighborhoods with limited resources. Often, individuals of lower socio-economic status are left uninformed and underrepresented, even in cases of research. This book uses case studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research to show different ways to understand environmental injustice, political strategies, and ways to expand citizen science engagement and environmental literacy around the world.
Text focuses on questions about the production and spread of knowledge, and the role science plays in society. Thom and Mah introduce the term “post-truths” that is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Which factors into how the intersection of science, politics, and values around the world determine a population’s attitude towards environmental justice. They argue for the importance of “science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living in environmental risks and hazards” (Thom and Mah 2022). In doing so, they recognize data isn't sufficient to solve environmental injustice, especially since issues of environmental pollution are so deeply intertwined with structures that perpetuate social inequalities. Instead, they suggest an interdisciplinary approach that integrates “legacies of environmental justice movement, participatory citizen science,” and “experts” to come up with holistic questions on how to overcome environmental inequality and advance the environmental justice movement amid challenges on the salience of environmental expertise.
Thom and Mah use four case studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research to show the importance of including citizens in scientific research. Citizen science refers to public engagement with science, from data sensing and crowdsourcing to design, collection, analysis of research. Although citizen science is not the only answer - with Catree (2016) pointing out that citizen-led processes have become a “lucrative business,” which creates a conflict of interest - this book redefines the meaning of “justice” within the environmental justice movement and explores “role and interpretation of citizenship within citizen science research (Thom and Mah 2022). They recognize there’s tension in balancing a community’s subjective experience and contextual knowledge with rigorous, scientifically appropriate research.
To tackle environmental injustice in a post-truth era, Thom and Mah (2022) argue there needs to be political change. An interdisciplinary approach is used to study local and global environmental justice challenges with a range of “qualitative and quantitative social science methods, including community-based participatory research (CBPR), epidemiology, ethnography, visual methods, and other innovative methods of participatory environmental justice and citizen science research” (Thom and Mah 2022).