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Residents of Love Canal, in the Niagara Falls region of Western New York, were alerted to signs of a toxic waste crisis involving the lethal chemical byproduct dioxin in the late 1970s. Residents learned about the crisis through news media, community activism and research, and their own visceral experiences – they could smell noxious fumes, noticed black sludge seeping into their basements, and saw children falling ill. Activists and academics carried out community-based research to survey the area in an effort to understand the extent of the hazard and its effects – data that they saw as missing, at the time – in turn generating evidence of changes in health and pregnancy abnormalities. In doing so, members of the community aimed to hold corporate and government stakeholders accountable to evacuate residents, organize remediation, and strengthen scientific studies and interventions to care for residents. Regional health authorities, however, dismissed community-based studies as “useless housewife data”. Activists responded by scrutinizing government and scientific studies, critiquing a lack of ecological validity and trustworthiness. Residents and community groups’ advocacy contributed to their exercise of epistemic authority, the creation of archival records and initiatives tracking the crisis over the last five decades, and wider public attention to Love Canal and other sites like it.

Image Description and Source: "Map showing distribution of symptoms believed to be caused by Love Canal pollutants," Digital Collections - University at Buffalo Libraries, May 1982.

Shankar, Saguna. 2023. "What's the Use of Data? Epistemic Authority and Environmental Injustice at Love Canal." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali. Kim Fortun, Phillio Baum and Prerna Srigyvan. Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaiti, Nov 8-11.

• The process of designing curriculum is quite useful as it details how different activities correspond to learning goals in science, mathematics, and technology. Fig. 3 describes the steps: selecting content through content specialists in the POAC team, making a curriculum outline, individual meetings with content specialists, and making the lesson plans. I really like the activities they designed, such as comparing different mask materials and how they protected against differently-sized viruses. They were also given time to research career pathways and present on epidemiology careers, a step that invites students to imagine career pathways. 

• I realize the scope and audience of this paper is different, but I am so curious about how the Imhotep Academy created a setting that encouraged underrepresented students to participate and speak up, given that they cite evidence of how difficult that can be. How did they choose participants? 

• Having read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed recently, I am thinking about his approach to curriculum design that is based on a feedback loop between would-be learners and would-be educators. The roles of learners and educators aren’t fixed. Content development is not done beforehand just by content specialists but in an iterative process with multiple feedback loops. Since very few research teams have the time or the resources to deploy Freire’s rigorous approach, I am not surprised that most curriculum development does not follow the route. And educators are working with former experiences anyway. So I am curious about how the authors’ previous experiences shaped their approach to curriculum design?

• A context for this paper is the controversy on the proposed revisions to the California math curriculum that conservative media outlets argue “waters down” calculus–a cherry topping on the college admissions cake–to privilege data science in middle-school grades. Education researchers contend that apart from physics and engineering majors, not many colleges actually require calculus for admissions (many private institutions do), and that the relevance of advanced calculus for college preparation is overrated. 

• National Commission on Excellence in Education ‘s 1983 report Nation At Risk: the need for a new STEM workforce specializing in computer science and technology 

• National Council on Mathematics 2000 guidelines for preparing American students for college in Common Core Mathematics 

• Stuck in the Shallow End: Virtual segregation; Inequality in learning computer science in American schools focusing on Black students 

Narrowed critique just to be of sincerity of CSR claims, not ideology of CSR. Consensus enforcing (above) silences any kind of dissent.

Enforcing consensus: Credibility and viability to compete for funding of your NGO is gone if you protest or dissent → performed consensus by silencing “stone throwing” NGOs or irrational opposition because you’re “actually trying to do something”, so the new unethical is the NGO who is just being stubborn or petty; 

Creating ads to educate consumers or communities on how to live responsibly [responsibilization]: flow of ethical expertise, from business/govt thru media to community/consumer 

Awards for CSR accomplishment is like moral capital; it also is ritualized like gift giving, reciprocal gratitude; circuit of exclusive events generates and legitimates this discourse, celebrity speakers, positive vibes

Confession of past sins plus highly visible partnerships with well-known NGOs, a very branded activity

To the extent that corporations genuinely believe that market access is going to end poverty... They seem to genuinely believe that the “third world” governments are corrupt and incompetent, in the way like in Orientalism colonialists seemed to genuinely believe that they were saving the nonwhite people from themselves. And they genuinely believe their resources are better and greater and their distribution networks etc. are better. 

NGOs have their back against the wall - they have to silently accept the language of the corporations and do it their way because they depend on the corporations for funding. So they may not see it as helpful but have to participate anyway

Redefined: New unethical is the NGO who doesn’t support CSR - they are bitter, unprogressive. Legitimate action - ethical - “partnership with business for the common cause”; Illegitimate action - unethical - “misguided, anti corporate campaigning” p17

Proof of the ethical is in rigorously calculated indices of corporate responsibility and awards presented by orgs that supposedly represent civil society

Money funneled thru well-known NGOs who have to do what they say

blame/displacement of scrutiny onto “Southern” i.e. previously colonized governments; pretty blatant language of colonialism (needing to save people from their own corrupt and incompetent governments) cast as “good governance” that corporations can do to lift people out of poverty with market access/inclusion

“Market comes to stand for social system as a whole” -p12

Business-led development becomes development orthodoxy

Reconfigured to appear as a double market competition - corporations competing for awards/ moral capital with their CSR actions, and NGOs as enterprises competing for corporate money to execute social good programs (but of course here the power is with corps to drive what is a social good program)

Public-private partnerships, defining development as market access, making it about scrutiny of “3rd world” government incompetence instead of corporate irresponsibility