civic action; data practices; public knowledge infrastructure; situated evidence; petro-publics; anthropocene
My research and teaching focuses on ways data are mobilized for different purposes in different settings – across scientific fields, as evidence in legal cases, and as shared points of references in social movements, for example.
I study how data practices change, the infrastructures and ideologies that shape them, and the contexts in which data gains or loses analytic and political power. I both study and help build robust public knowledge infrastructure, working with advocacy organizations, museums, public libraries, and other creative data practitioners.
For my current dissertation research, I study how residents of petrochemical fenceline communities in the Southern United States, Taiwan, and Vietnam organize against Formosa Plastics, one of the world's largest petrochemical plants. I focus particularly on how advocates leverage diverse “civic data” types (leaked company records and community air monitoring outputs, for example), knowledge infrastructures (government datasets and community archives, for example), and institutions (museums and schools, for example) to turn global plastics production into a public problem for next-generation environmentalism.
When complete, the study will offer improved understanding of the different civic data tactics, imaginaries, and styles of action by emerging communities seeking to build collaborative capacity to solve public problems.
In my research, I’ve learned about important data gaps but also about huge amounts of data collected by activists over years of work. Often this data is stored in activists’ homes, inaccessible to others working on related issues. I’ve thus also learned about the need for civic data infrastructure and begun asking questions about how such infrastructure should be designed, governed and sustained going forward.
In process, I’ve learned that data infrastructure has many layers and technical components (from data collection technologies to repositories, technical services, user agreements, visualization capabilities, etc.), and depends on many types of expertise. I’ve also learned that to build good civic data infrastructure, we’ll also need to continually reflect on what is needed, and on the limits and affordances of the infrastructures we’ve built so far. I’ve come to see civic data practices, expertise and infrastructure as an important focus for ethnographic research, with rich, politically important possibilities for collaboration with the communities ethnographers study.
There is a long history of communities impacted by the same companies trying to organize (see "Communities against Corporations" in Fortun 2001), which continues to raise questions about how to bring communities into visibility and what kind of infrastructure is needed to connect across places.
In the global environmental movement and related advocacy efforts, writing reports is a way to share analysis, provide advice, and build a track record of evidence to make a problem public. While important, they often take a signficant time to prepare, depending on their scope and length. I argue that such reports can be supplemented by community archives that allow for more rapid forms of "staccato reporting" and multimodal forms of expression. See for example a rendering of the industrial incident table as interactive timeline.
Morever, a digital community archive might become a venue to reflect and annotate reports – enabling a focus beyond the outcomes of campaigns and on the "dilemmas and trade-offs, curves and forks in the road" that characterize what Lichterman (2021, 259) calls different styles of advocacy or civic action.
In 2016, the U.S. EPA under Donald Trump began to remove references to Climate Change from their website, leading to a concerted effort of scientists and advocates to "rescue" data, but also elaborate methods to monitor websites (Tirrell et al. 2020). In this example, almost the opposite is going on: Formosa Plastics is trying to "greenwash" the website for it's latest petrochemical complex in the light of activist campaigns.
Civic community archives can help document such data rescue and monitoring efforts. Further, they can help make data available that is otherwise precariously stored.
Formosa Plastics Global Archive (台灣塑膠檔案館)
This digital collection supports a transnational network of people concerned about the operations of the Formosa Plastics Corporation, one of the world's largest petrochemical companies. The material includes public coverage of Formosa Plastics, as well as documentation collected by activists over many years of work. I co-develop the archive with colleagues in the US, Taiwan, and Vietnam, including public exhibtions, documentary films, and other multimedia projects.
Quotidian Anthropocenes
This research explores how "the Anthropocene" is playing out on the ground in different settings. The aim is to create both situated, place-based and comparative perspective, building new modes of collective knowledge and action. For the project, I developed a set of analytic questions to study the role of civic infrastructure for addressing anthropocene problems across systems and scales.
The TRANSnational-STS Covid-19 Project
This project brings together researchers in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to follow and analyze COVID-19 as it plays out in different settings. As part of the Data Group, I developed an emerging set of analytic questions to study data practices and infrastructures in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, including dashboards and tracking apps.
Engaging Science, Technology, and Society Journal
As "metadata editor" for the ESTS Journal, I am currently working on a set of guidelines and procedures to better link published journal articles with source data hosted on the STS Infrastructures platform.
When responding to corporations, state agencies, and other stakeholders, community groups often encounter divergent data, creating the need to provide more situated evidence and developing critical readings of the data.