Scholarly Works, Science, Technology, and Society
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Browsing Scholarly Works, Science, Technology, and Society by Author "Allen, Barbara L."
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- Collaborative Workshops for Community Meaning-Making and Data Analyses: How Focus Groups Strengthen Data by Enhancing Understanding and Promoting UseAllen, Barbara L.; Lees, Johanna; Cohen, Alison K.; Jeanjean, Maxime (MDPI, 2019-09-11)Community-based participatory research is a growing approach, but often includes higher levels of community engagement in the research design and data collection stages than in the data interpretation stage. Involving study participants in this stage could further knowledge justice, science that aligns with and supports social justice agendas. This article reports on two community-based participatory environmental health surveys conducted between 2015 and 2019 in an industrial region near Marseille, France, and focuses specifically on our approach of organizing focus groups to directly involve residents and community stakeholders in the analysis and interpretation process. We found that, in these focus groups, residents triangulated across many different sources of information—study findings, local knowledge, and different types of expert knowledge—to reach conclusions about the health of their community and make recommendations for what should be done to improve community health outcomes. We conclude that involving residents in the data analysis and interpretation stage can promote epistemic justice and lead to final reports that are more useful to community stakeholders and decision-makers.
- Cradle of a revolution? The industrial transformation of Louisiana's lower Mississippi riverAllen, Barbara L. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006-01)This article provides an overview of the petrochemical industry's transformation of Louisiana's Lower Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans from the early 1900s to the present. First there is a broad discussion of why the industry choose this location for development. The focus is then on a historical understanding of how the conditions for the environmental justice movement came to exist. These include: patterns of early land ownership with both race and class implications; early, systematic denial of employment to African Americans, willful lack of industry oversight on the part of regulators; and tax and development schemes that depleted local community coffers and services.
- Making effective participatory environmental health science through collaborative data analysisAllen, Barbara L. (Manchester University Press, 2020-07-14)
- Strongly Participatory Science and Knowledge Justice in an Environmentally Contested RegionAllen, Barbara L. (Sage, 2018)This article draws insights from a case study examining unanswered health questions of residents in two polluted towns in an industrial region in southern France. A participatory health study, as conducted by the author, is presented as a way to address undone science by providing the residents with relevant data supporting their illness claims. Local residents were included in the health survey process, from the formulation of the questions to the final data analysis. Through this strongly participatory science (SPS) process, the townspeople offered many creative ideas in the final report for how the data could be used to assist in improving their health and environment and policy work is already in evidence, resulting from the study. Drawing from the literature on participatory science and expertise as well as from the initial outcomes of the local health study, I propose that SPS produces a form of knowledge justice. Understanding knowledge and its making as part of a social justice agenda aligns well with environmental justice frames. Through SPS, local residents have a hermeneutical resource to make sense of their embodied lives and augment their claims with strong data supporting actions for improving their health and environment.
- A Successful Experiment in Participatory Science for Promoting Change in a French Industrial RegionAllen, Barbara L. (Society for Social Studies of Science, 2017)The author and her team worked with the residents in an industrial area in France to produce a participatory epidemiological study about their health. The final report, drafted with input from the citizens, attracted the national press and the interest of many other polluted communities. The survey is currently being used to promote environmental change by the residents, their elected officials, and local doctors. This reinforces the author’s claim that rigorously designed participatory science can further citizen environmental initiatives and provide them policyleverage.