Refining Expertise : How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges / Gwen Ottinger.
2013
TD195.P4 O88 2016
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Details
Title
Refining Expertise : How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges / Gwen Ottinger.
Author
Ottinger, Gwen, author.
ISBN
9780814762394
Published
New York, NY : : New York University Press, [2013]
Copyright
©2013
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource
Other Standard Identifiers
10.18574/nyu/9780814762370.001.0001 doi
Call Number
TD195.P4 O88 2016
Dewey Decimal Classification
363.7384
Summary
Winner of the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize presented by the Society for Social Studies of ScienceResidents 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' authority?Refining Expertise argues that the answer lies in the way that refinery scientists and engineers defined themselves as experts. Rather than claiming to be infallible, they began to portray themselves as responsible-committed to operating safely and to contributing to the well-being of the community. The volume shows that by grounding their claims to responsibility in influential ideas from the larger culture about what makes good citizens, nice communities, and moral companies, refinery scientists made it much harder for residents to challenge their expertise and thus re-established their authority over scientific questions related to the refinery's health and environmental effects.Gwen Ottinger here shows how industrial facilities' current approaches to dealing with concerned communities-approaches which leave much room for negotiation while shielding industry's environmental and health claims fromcritique-effectively undermine not only individual grassroots campaigns but also environmental justice activism and far-reaching efforts to democratize science. This work drives home the need for both activists and politically engaged scholars to reconfigure their own activities in response, in order to advance community health and robust scientific knowledge about it.
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Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 18. Sep 2023)
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print 9780814762370
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. The Battlefront
2. Dangerous Stories
3. Noisome Neighbors
4. From Deliberation to Dialogue
5. Responsible Refiners
6. Passive Revolution and Resistance
Notes
References
Index
About the Author
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. The Battlefront
2. Dangerous Stories
3. Noisome Neighbors
4. From Deliberation to Dialogue
5. Responsible Refiners
6. Passive Revolution and Resistance
Notes
References
Index
About the Author