Community Expertise for Public Health: A Case of Public Water

Abstract

This case study of teaching considers how Appalachian communities resist extractive knowledge practices through asserting their lived lives as valid data. With the case of environmental justice organizing in affected communities from coal mining and industrial pollution, this case is interested in how local residents, especially women, have become "community experts," employing storytelling, oral history, and environmental monitoring to challenge the dominant discourses of external researchers, government agencies, and corporations. Such groups grapple with environmental defense and public health through embodied knowing and social remembrance instead of institutional sources of evidence like lab reports and official records. It is in this context that interdisciplinary methods like Science and Technology Studies (STS), feminist theory, and environmental justice critical theory are utilized to give us a window into how knowledge is being made, prioritized, and problematized. It challenges the idea that facts must be severed from persons and unmoored, and shows how knowledge derived from a person's body and position can be used to hold people accountable and to struggle for change. A few examples include using "bucket brigades" to monitor air quality, community mapping projects, and direct testimony by residents of environmental destruction. Through empowerment of the knowledge of the people, the case problematizes who determines problems and proposes solutions, especially in poor rural communities. It invites the learner to ponder research ethics, epistemic power, and evidence politics within environmental conflicts.