Street Science

Last week while prepping for my welfare brief, I went in to Professor Talwalker's office hours to get some guidance on the presentation. We ended up talking a bit about my PE in relation to my major, and I expressed a desire to have my PE unify my interest in Environmental Science and along with my interests in poverty and public health. I've been meaning to find a way to incorporate my ES Senior Thesis with my PE, but I've been at a loss for how to go about that. While in office hours, Professor Talwalker recommended that I look into a book called Street Science by Jason Corburn from CED. Professor Corburn happened to be the very person who helped me find my PE by putting me into contact with his colleague, the Executive Director of the UHRC (my PE org) after I went in to his office hours after he gave a guest lecture in one of my classes last semester.

Based on Professor Talwalker's suggestion, I started reading Professor Corburn's book, and for the first time since I found my PE org, I felt a sense of excitement, a sense that I was stumbling onto something big. Street Science is about how the culture of expertise in Environmental Health has lead to the exclusion of community members from contributing to the process of gathering knowledge about their specific environmental health issues. Experts often enter into communities bringing along tools such as "risk assessment" and other statistical models, which they then implement and the results of which they then hand off to analysts whose job is to decide on politically viable policy items. Clearly this is not a particularly participatory model. Professor Corburn goes on to explain how there are numerous examples of how science is often conducted in communities using informal methods by community members concerned about their health. He provides an example of how in Brooklyn, a community organization called El Puente conducted a student-led community health survey project to investigate alarmingly high rates of asthma in their neighborhood which eventually led to a long term partnership with a non-profit called Community Information and Epidemiological Technologies (CIET). Examples such as these provide legitimacy to community knowledge. Corburn points out that when community members are involved in not just conducting research, but in deciding on the relevant areas of focus and on the most appropriate methods and frameworks (for example perhaps "risk assessment" is an inadequate model for a particular community), environmental health policy can transcend the level of superficial, token gestures of good-faith towards under-served populations.

Corburn's book consists of ethnographic research with community members in Brooklyn in order to explore this idea of what he calls "street science." One way I'm thinking about weaving my ES thesis into my PE is by looking into conducting ethnographic research (similar to what Professor Corburn did) while working with the women's groups established by my PE org, the UHRC in slums in India. Slums represent not only the intractability of poverty, but also urban environmental degradation at its worst. Surely there is a wealth of pragmatic knowledge that slum community members have regarding their own environmental health situations that could be invaluable in understanding what policies would be most effective in improving these situations.