Small Sensors, Big Disruptions? Questioning Innovations in Air Pollution Monitoring

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

Abstract

STS scholars emphasize how critical engagements between experts and non-experts on issues of environmental injustice create ‘ruptures’, transforming both technoscientific and environmental advocacy practices (Ottinger & Cohen, 2011). Delhi’s toxic air is vibrant with such ruptures. Both experts and environmental advocates are careful to express the complexity of air’s chemistry and health effects, forming collaborations to overcome insufficient or non-contextual data. They also state that already enough is known about Delhi’s air for concrete interventions to occur. This tension between knowing enough and the urgency to generate ever more data is managed by air monitoring technologies and networks. One particularly fluid technology is the hand-held air sampler, which Delhi’s citizens have used in the past to not only shape their everyday lives, but to contest government-produced air quality data. Previously dismissed as inaccurate and imprecise, recent government initiatives have started calling these sensors as ‘empowering communities’, beginning collaborative and transnational research projects to standardize and certify them.
However, for Delhi, the call to integrate low-cost sensors into regulatory monitoring did not come from highly-stressed communities intending to prove high exposure from a particular polluting source, but from citizens with enough disposable wealth to buy these sensors. If scholars studying environmental justice note that mobilizing local exposures through monitoring could democratize environmental decision-making, what does this particular rupture signify for representation of environmental knowledges? In the process of getting standardized and modified, whose knowledges would these sensors capture, and who/what would they avoid?

Author

• Prerna Srigyan, University of California - Irvine