This project, funded by the Science, Technology, and Society Program, examines how biomonitoring technology is reshaping stakeholder struggles over the future of regulatory science that governments use to regulate chemicals. Specifically, the researchers analyze the regulatory, policy, industry, scientific, and legal implications of chemical biomonitoring research in the United States, due to its proliferation in the government, academic and environmental health advocacy arenas. "Civic epistemology" is used as the theoretical foundation for elucidating how knowledge claims regarding biomonitoring are made and contested through regulatory science processes and institutions. Research relies on data generated by interviews, participant observations, media and document analysis, and investigates the following themes: 1) the impacts of biomonitoring research on regulatory science and knowledge production in environmental health policy; 2) whether and how stakeholders (communities, industry, scientists, consumers, and environmental advocacy organizations) engage in debates about the potential and pitfalls of biomonitoring that may re-shape the landscape of regulatory decision-making and environmental policy; 3) whether and how industry has responded to biomonitoring evidence to change its production, through strategies such as product substitution and toxics use reduction; and 4) whether and how biomonitoring may be changing the evidence and standards of proof used in toxic tort cases.
Biomonitoring could potentially shift the scientific, regulatory, and public gaze in ways that will transform knowledge production in the environmental health sciences. This project aids sociology and science and technology studies to examine how political context shapes civic epistemologies about the impact of chemical body burdens on community environmental health. It also provides a vehicle to explore knowledge production under conditions of novel uncertainty, at the intersection of social movements, science, political economy, and public policy. Civic epistemology theory remains underdeveloped, particularly in terms of how regulatory science intersects with community movements, policy-making, legal systems, and corporations. This project helps fill this gap by investigating how biomonitoring debates can reshape these other domains.
This project is directly relevant to a broad range of critical policy and regulatory issues, including public health screening and surveillance, community right-to-know, toxic tort litigation, environmental justice claims, chemicals policy, public oversight of industrial production, and regulatory science. The interdisciplinarity of the research team will ensure that the project generates new conceptual and empirical resources for improving regulatory science and environmental health policy, specifically in chemical risk assessment, standard-setting and the treatment of scientific uncertainty, and in the development of new, deliberative, and publicly engaged regulatory regimes and forms of scientific knowledge production.
