Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement

Gwen Ottinger is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program at University of Washington--Bothell. Benjamin Cohen is Assistant Professor at Lafayette College and the author of Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside.

Case studies exploring how experts' encounters with environmental justice are changing technical and scientific practice.

"This book brings together many of the top scholars at the intersection of science and technology studies and environmental justice studies to explore how scientists and engineers engage with environmental justice issues and activists, often in the face of significant institutional constraints. Through detailed case studies, the scholars break new ground by showing how both the topics studied and methods used to understand difficult environmental justice issues have undergone significant innovation." -- David J. Hess, Professor of Sociology, Vanderbilt University -- David Hess "This collection brings empirical insight and fresh analytical perspective to issues of science, engineering, and environmental justice. In presenting scientific identities and practices as dynamic rather than static, it takes us beyond science-citizen dualities and opens up transformative possibilities for both science and environmental change." -- Alan Irwin, Copenhagen Business School; author of Citizen Science -- Alan Irwin "The questions raised by the authors about environmental justice and the transformation of science and engineering related to environmental decision making are important and have been largely neglected in the literature until very recently. The rigorous and scholarly discussion of how risk science can be transformed by values associated with the environmental justice movement is quite impressive." -- Elaine Vaughan, Research Professor and Professor Emerita of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine -- Elaine Vaughan