I’ll comment on possibilities for Albany, NY, where there is an active group of NY Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) researchers trying to work with a highly-stressed (polluted, economically insecure, politically disempowered) community just adjacent to the Port of Albany, focusing especially on truck traffic and fine particles. We interviewed the group last spring:
Brian P. Frank, Ph.D., P.E.
Section Chief, Emissions Measurement Research Group
Bureau of Mobile Sources and Technology Development
Division of Air Resources
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
The group used to do vehicles missions testing and modeling so come fully from the air pollution side (not the health side). They also are new to work with the community, though were getting much more comfortable with it when I was last in touch with them. Importantly, this group did a study that pointed to routine truck traffic en route to a federal highway (rather than the port) as the source of much of the air pollution in Albany’s South End – which they imagined as harder to address because of something like “rights to the highway” (especially if federal). I haven’t followed up to explore the legality of this. I also haven’t really explored what the shift of attention (in some arenas) to fine particle means… for health, intervention, policy, etc.
I can imagine this DEC group appreciating a number of briefings, configured something like this:
-- “Strategies and Rationales for Involving Citizens and Community in Air Monitoring”
-- “Strategies and Rationales for Granular Air Pollution Monitoring” (I already sent the group this reference -- about block-by-block air pollution mapping Oakland )
-- “Near Roadway Air Pollution, Health Impacts and Intervention Strategies”
-- “Reducing Pollution at Ports: Strategies and Successes” (There is considerable air pollution advocacy around ports in Houston and Los Angeles/Long Beach. See this on Houston, for example, involving TEJAS, a leading EJ group.)
I think everyone on the call is familiar with my profile, but I’ve pasted in a professional bio below. More pointedly: I’ve been involved in TAF from the outset (mid-2000s, when we mostly worked to characterize diverse asthma knowledge’s, mostly among scientists in different disciplines and locations) and have been happy to watch TAF evolve into a ever widening research collective that includes both individual and collaborative projects. The 6+ (now 11) Cities project is now the center of my TAF work; it is definitely stretching our collaborative capacities – in ways I find both overwhelming and exciting. I’m scheduled to write an essay about the TAF collaboration in coming weeks and will share for feedback.
My standard bio: Kim Fortun is a Professor and Department Chair in the University of California Irvine’s Department of Anthropology. Her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, and on experimental ethnographic methods and research design. Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability. Fortun’s book Advocacy After Bhopal Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders was awarded the 2003 Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society. From 2005-2010, Fortun co-edited the Journal of Cultural Anthropology. Currently, Fortun is working on a book titled Late Industrialism: Making Environmental Sense, on The Asthma Files, a collaborative project to understand how air pollution and environmental public health are dealt with in different contexts, and on design of the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), an open source/access digital platform for anthropological and historical research. Fortun also runs the EcoEd Research Group, which turns ethnographic findings about environmental problems into curriculum delivered to young students (kindergarten-grade 12), and is helping organize both the Disaster-STS Research Network, and the Research Data Alliance’s Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group. Fortun co-edits a book series for University of Pennsylvania Press titled Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster, designed to connect academic research to public problems and policy, reaching audiences in different regions of the world. September 2017 through August 2019, Fortun will serve as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the international scholarly society representing the field of Science and Technology Studies.