Misunderstanding Citizen Science: Hermeneutic Ignorance in U.S. Environmental Regulation

ABSTRACT

In the United States, ‘fenceline communities' next to petrochemical facilities have been conducting and advocating for air monitoring since the 1990s, highlighting gaps in U.S. environmental regulators' monitoring programs. Citizen science is imagined to be valuable as a source of data for filling such gaps. But fenceline communities' air monitoring activities also underscore regulators' hermeneutic ignorance, namely their lack of appropriate concepts, categories, and metrics for understanding the temporality of air pollution as experienced by marginalized communities. Citizen science could play a valuable role in addressing hermeneutic ignorance, by providing more adequate epistemic resources for understanding the environmental harms. In the case of community monitoring programs, these have included epistemic resources for understanding the immediacy of air pollution and the chronic nature of unpredictable spikes in pollution. However, regulators confronted with community-led monitoring have acknowledged neither citizen scientists’ contributions to epistemic resources nor their own hermeneutic ignorance, limiting the potential for citizen science to address institutionalized ignorance. Recognizing hermeneutic ignorance shows the important role that epistemic resources play in institutionalizing ignorance, and points to reforms necessary if citizen science is to make robust contributions to environmental protection.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• citizen science
• epistemic resources
• hermeneutic ignorance
• knowledge gaps
• undone science

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to all of the air monitoring advocates and residents of fenceline communities who have spoken to me over the years. I thank them for their generosity, patience, and insight. My thanks go as well to the editors of Science as Culture, the special issue editors, and two anonymous reviewers for their thorough and constructive feedback. Their involvement has improved this paper considerably. I am grateful for a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which provided time to write, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which provided a stimulating environment in which to do so.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Fenceline monitoring rules have subsequently been adopted or are in development by other state and regional agencies, including the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District (both in California).

2 The Air Sensor Toolbox still exists, but is no longer geared towards citizen scientists. Some of the resources mentioned here, including quality assurance guidelines, still exist on the updated Toolbox site. Others, like the videos from the Community Air Monitoring Training, have been taken down. In those cases, the analysis here relies on the author’s notes and transcripts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation: [Grant Number 1352143].

Notes on contributors

Gwen Ottinger

Gwen Ottinger is Associate Professor at Drexel University, in the Department of Politics and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society. They direct the Fair Tech Collective, a research group that uses social science theory and methods to promote social justice in science and technology.