The Asthma Files: Making and Doing STS

• In Event: Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - II

Abstract

he Asthma Files (TAF) is a (decade) long-running research consortium that uses experimental ethnography – laced with insights from STS – to understand and help advance environmental public health. One current project examines air pollution governance in cities around the world, with research groups in every city (from Hyderabad to Houston, Los Angeles, and Cuenca, Ecuador). The many scales and types of collaboration involved is taxing but exciting. In this presentation, we’ll share what we’ve learned – focusing on what we have come to call “collaboration ethnography.” In this, we use collaborative practice in our own research projects to (ethnographically) understand different ways collaboration works (and often doesn’t), and how the design of supporting sociotechnical systems makes a difference, encoding theories of language, knowledge and politics. Our work is inspired by the influential Harvard Six Cities study, which first linked air pollution (PM 2.5) to health impacts, then translated its findings into policy (despite considerable political pushback). The Harvard Six Cities study has also demonstrated the importance and significance of building research communities that stay with their problems over time, ever expanding their reach, always developing new modes of analysis, attuned to what has been left out. The Asthma Files experiments with was this kind of long-range collaboration, making and doing STS.

Authors

• Michael A Fortun, University of California, Irvine

• Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine

• Aalok Khandekar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

• Maka Suarez, Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography

• Alli Morgan, RPI

• Katie Cox, University of California, Irvine

• Rohit Negi, School of Global Affairs, Ambedkar University Delhi