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Thesis ID: CBB822110081

Envisioning Post-Industrial Futures: Community Activism and Government Environmental Health Science in Southeastern Pennsylvania (2015)

Petryna, Adriana (Advisor)
Britt Dahlberg (Author)

Petryna, Adriana
University of Pennsylvania
Publication date: 2015
Language: English

URI: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1721792600?accountid=12964

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Environmental history Anthropology Philosophy Theology Citizen science; community science Religion Cultural anthropology

What does it mean for cities to recover from industrial contamination and decline amidst toxic waste and uncertain environmental health risks? To understand the social, political, and economic consequences of the ways risk is currently understood, measured, and managed through research and government regulation, this dissertation tracked how residents, government staff and scientists, and developers each went about organizing around different conceptualizations of risk and future possibilities, during an EPA Superfund investigation. The project focused on Ambler, Pennsylvania, a town built around asbestos manufacturing and dealing with a legacy of asbestos waste. Ethnographic methods were used to study collaborations between residents and health agencies from 2009 to 2013. I found that the mundane practice of delineating an object of public concern, study, and government action - through debating which concerns should become the focus of these joint efforts and clean-up - became a key place for geographic, temporal, and social boundary making around risky and safe places, times, and people. These boundaries came to exclude residents with historical and kin ties to place from participation in defining and addressing risks, and broader public planning, in favor of the imagined (and desired) mobile citizen of the future. I argue that in the backdrop of a new wave of post-industrial site redevelopment, government-citizen risk science becomes a key site for contesting access to public space, and with it, visions of who belongs in collective social and political futures. This project advances anthropological and science studies' understandings of (1) how bodies, health, and environment are being re-conceptualized and reconfigured around ideas of "risk" and "environmental health;" (2) how expertise, evidence, and the terms for evaluating knowledge-production practices are re-negotiated when science is used to address public problems and when citizens are involved in the making of knowledge about the environments in which they live; and (3) the forms of governance operating in contemporary public health research and interventions which increasingly incorporate the built and social environment into health research. The project holds implications for a wide range of scholarship, practice, and policy.

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