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Winner of the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize presented by the Society for Social Studies of Science Residents of a small Louisiana town were sure that the oil refinery next door was making them sick. As part of a campaign demanding relocation away from the refinery, they collected scientific data to prove it. Their campaign ended with a settlement agreement that addressed many of their grievances—but not concerns about their health. Yet, instead of continuing to collect data, residents began to let refinery scientists' assertions that their operations did not harm them stand without challenge. What makes a community move so suddenly from actively challenging to apparently accepting experts' auth...
Case studies exploring how experts' encounters with environmental justice are changing technical and scientific practice. Over the course of nearly thirty years, the environmental justice movement has changed the politics of environmental activism and influenced environmental policy. In the process, it has turned the attention of environmental activists and regulatory agencies to issues of pollution, toxics, and human health as they affect ordinary people, especially people of color. This book argues that the environmental justice movement has also begun to transform science and engineering. The chapters present case studies of technical experts' encounters with environmental justice activis...
The fourth edition of an authoritative overview, with all new chapters that capture the state of the art in a rapidly growing field. Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a flourishing interdisciplinary field that examines the transformative power of science and technology to arrange and rearrange contemporary societies. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field, reviewing current research and major theoretical and methodological approaches in a way that is accessible to both new and established scholars from a range of disciplines. This new edition, sponsored by the Society for Social Studies of Science, is the fourth i...
What role do science and technology play in society? What is the nature of expert knowledge? What is science’s relation to democracy? This introduction to science, technology, and society answers these questions, and more, by exploring contemporary research on topics such as expertise, activism, science policy, and innovation. It offers a comprehensive resource for considering the place that science and technology have in contemporary societies, and the roles that they can and should play. Accessible to a non-specialist audience, it draws on a rich range of cases and examples, from nuclear activism in India to content moderation in Kenya. Framing science as always social, and society as always shaped by science and technology, it asks: what worlds do we want science and technology to bring into being?
An examination of the neighborhood transformation, gentrification, and displacement that accompany more compact development around transit. Cities and regions throughout the world are encouraging smarter growth patterns and expanding their transit systems to accommodate this growth, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and satisfy new demands for mobility and accessibility. Yet despite a burgeoning literature and various policy interventions in recent decades, we still understand little about what happens to neighborhoods and residents with the development of transit systems and the trend toward more compact cities. Research has failed to determine why some neighborhoods change both physically a...
Studies show that citizen science projects--projects involving nonprofessionals--face dilemmas ranging from austerity to presumed boundaries between science and activism. By unpacking the politics of citizen science, this book aims to help people negotiate a complex political landscape and choose paths moving toward social change and environmental sustainability.
An examination of why government agencies allow environmental injustices to persist. Many state and federal environmental agencies have put in place programs, policies, and practices to redress environmental injustices, and yet these efforts fall short of meeting the principles that environmental justice activists have fought for. In From the Inside Out, Jill Lindsey Harrison offers an account of the bureaucratic culture that hinders regulatory agencies' attempts to reduce environmental injustices. It is now widely accepted that America's poorest communities, communities of color, and Native American communities suffer disproportionate harm from environmental hazards, with higher exposure to...
Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of—and are s...
On one day in 2009, in thirty-eight countries around the world, 4,000 ordinary citizens gathered to discuss the future of climate policy. This project, 'WWViews', was the first-ever global democratic deliberation – an attempt to enable ordinary people to reach informed decisions on and impact the global policy process. This book – which analyzes the experiences and lessons from this ground-breaking event – marks the beginning of a new kind of democratic politics, providing practical lessons on how to increase the impact of global deliberation projects within the media and on official policy processes. The authors explore important themes for participatory approaches from the local to t...
This Research Handbook thoroughly examines the difficult and rapidly expanding problem of national, transnational, and international environmental crimes, including air and water pollution, unlawful mining and timber harvesting, and transnational trafficking of endangered species. It provides an understanding of cutting-edge empirical and theoretical research on these crimes and their legal prosecution.