Why Not “Just Get a Better Map”? The Counter-Governance of Air Pollution against Expertise

• In Event: Innovating Air Pollution Governance: Collaborations, Interruptions, and Regenerations

Abstract

Back in the early stages of The Asthma Files, several of us optimistically embraced pollution maps as a democratic and field-leveling technology. If the general public simply knew the facts, we could expect better governance to emerge as a matter of course. The naiveté of this assumption is not merely that it assumes local government is amenable to public pressure, but that it assumes that the proper attitude of the public is active participant in the governing system. The underlying assumptions of activity in the subject, explored and contested by diverse figures in STS (through continental philosophy and more broadly in many currents of feminist thought), include a core belief in the active consumption of data and the participation in drawing correct communal conclusions from what is known. In different ways with Kristeva, Irigaray, Foucault, and Derrida, the communal receptivity was seen as precedent to the dyad of active / passive. In our context, we pose that question in terms of the expert and the ways in which a map of air pollution could signal a shift in the community’s relation to expertise if the question is not whether the expertise embodied in data enables proper governing activity (by the community or the elite), but whether it enables experts to respond to emerging patterns of vulnerability (or receptivity) in communities formed through their exposures.

Author

• Daniel Price, University of Houston, Honors College