The Double Force of Vulnerability

Abstract

This article reviews ethnographic literature of environmental justice (EJ). Both a social movement and scholarship, EJ is a crucial domain for examining the intersections of environment, well-being, and social power, and yet has largely been dominated by quantitative and legal analyses. A minority literature in comparison, ethnography attends to other valences of injustice and modes of inequality. Through this review, we argue that ethnographies of EJ forward our understanding of how environmental vulnerability is lived, as communities experience and confront toxic environments. Following a genealogy of EJ, we explore three prominent ethnographic thematics of EJ: the production of vulnerability through embodied toxicity; the ways that injustice becomes embedded in landscapes; and how processes like research collaborations and legal interventions become places of thinking and doing the work of justice. Finally, we identify emergent trends and challenges, suggesting future research directions for ethnographic consideration.

Forced Emplacement

“…Literature linking environmental injustice to histories of domination and enduring legacies of colonialism is far too vast to cover comprehensively. Here, I complement existing reviews that historicize uneven climate vulnerability (Gutierrez et al 2021;Th omas et al 2019;Vaughn et al 2021: 285). My narrower method in curating this review has been to select case studies from the last decade that illuminate climate-intensifi ed immobilization as an emerging site of political struggle.…”

Joining collective impact and community science: a framework for core collaborative community science

“…Changing the science paradigm to address environmental injustices at relevant scales requires a different cultural and structural approach for identifying and organizing community science efforts, recognizing that the conditions that produce environmental injustices (such as the Duwamish Valley's poor air quality) also create grounds for collective action (Gutierrez et al 2021). A community's ability to organize and act collectively is a powerful force in community science partnerships.…”

“…At the same time, low-income communities, often with larger populations of racial or ethnic minorities, bear an inequitable burden of industrial and transportation-related pollution and their resultant health and environmental disparities White 2011, Lane et al 2022). Although these communities may have more solidarity for collective action (Gutierrez et al 2021) and more to gain by engaging in community science, they likely have fewer resources to support action to reduce disparities. Community science offers two ways to work toward environmental justice: through engagements that build scientific capacity among underrepresented groups in science, and through applied research activities that directly lead to improved environmental conditions (Soleri et al 2016, Ottinger 2017.…”

Failing kidneys: Hotspots, blind spots and biopolitics of indifference

“…The third route reflects environmental justice literatures, which have been critical to understanding the unequal distribution of environmental hazards, toxic exposures, and impacts of climate change, as legacies of racism, colonialism, and unchecked economic growth (Bullard, 2005; Liboiron, 2021; Gutierrez et al., 2021). They are critical to understanding how a politics of evidence is produced, mobilized, and discounted (Checker, 2007).…”