A Typology of Government Agency EJ Data Tools and a Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication
Topics:
Keywords: environmental justice, Justice40, data-driven governance, data visualization, relationality
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Authors:
Leah Horgan, Computing Innovation Fellow, Northeastern University
Vasiliki Pistoftzian,
Kourtney Bichotte Dunner,
Kira Mok,
Eliza Boetsch,
Sophie Kelly,
Katherine Dickinson,
Eric Nost,
Sara Wylie,
Roseann Bongiavanni,
Abstract
Historically, academic and government environmental justice (EJ) research and communication efforts have centered on quantifying and mapping or visualizing the environmental harms faced by EJ communities (communities facing elevated levels of environmental harm). Unangax Education scholar Eve Tuck critiques such frameworks as “damage-centered” because they cast entire communities—predominantly low-income, BIPOC communities—as deficient. In this case study, we offer a typology of government agency EJ data tools to identify three core pitfalls of damage-centered research in EJ projects: reification, obfuscation, and discretization. Here we analyze two important U.S. federal EJ data tools and related policies and improvement projects: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s EJSCREEN, and the recently unveiled Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). We center our study on the Chelsea Creek Region in Massachusetts to examine how these tools render the area as damaged. In response, this talk will describe preliminary research—data analysis from 20 interviews—on an alternative approach to communicating EJ issues based on a relational rather than damage-centered EJ framework that advances relationships as the fundamental unit of both analysis and responsibility—in this case the greater Boston region’s relationship to ongoing environmental harms in the Chelsea Creek region.
A Typology of Government Agency EJ Data Tools and a Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract