The Emotional Support for “Facts” in Environmental Health Activism

• In Event: Toxic Subjects: Historical, Legal, Occupational, and Medical Perspectives - I

Abstract

I take as a point of departure an interlocutor’s assertion that within environmental health activism there is a place for both fact and emotion but one must “lead with the facts”. She sees her success as an activist rooted in her scientific literacy and ability to work with facts, data, and evidence. However, I draw from ethnographic research on the broader issue in which she is involved – cleanup of a toxic waste site in Houston – to argue that the binary between fact and emotion does not hold. While scientific literacy allows activists to extract meaningful numbers from large volumes of otherwise inaccessible scientific information, it is not enough to extract such a number and then leave it to act in the world. Rather, there are various forces, both individual and structural, that must uphold a “fact,” keeping it relevant so that it can enact change. These forces, I argue, are often affective and emotional – what a proponent of science-backed activism might be quick to write off as “subjective.” But from my ethnographic findings, employing affect and emotion, particularly when inhabiting a particular racialized and gendered subject, undergirds the use and efficacy of “facts.” An important question to think through is: how might this critique – that fact and emotion cannot be separated – be productive and generative in the world beyond STS scholarship?

Author

• Amy Kuritzky, Rice University