This project lays the foundations for a causal analysis of lay/expert collaborative research or citizen science. While the potential of such collaborations to advance knowledge and societal well-being are well known, little is known about what makes them succeed or fail. The PIs propose to bridge this gap by adopting a new approach that goes beyond traditional observational studies. The PIs propose to use mixed methods and an innovative parallel-study design. They will demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach by examining the social conditions and processes that produce or forestall transformative, community-driven science in response to the current Gulf oil disaster. In addition, they plan to produce interdisciplinary and socially robust environmental knowledge about the impacts of the disaster by combining the expertise of environmental scientists, social scientists, and Vietnamese-Americans living and working in south Louisiana who bring their deep experiential knowledge of the region?s impacted ecosystems to the scientific work.
Intellectual Merits
The proposed study is interdisciplinary. It is designed to advance basic social studies of science while simultaneously contributing to the production of socially robust environmental science. It does so in the form of two parallel analyses. The first is a community-driven toxicological study of wetlands contamination; the second is a sociological analysis of the initiation, development, and execution of that collaborative process. Both studies address substantively important problems. The community-driven study will investigate the exposure and impacts of petroleum hydrocarbons on finfish species that are culturally and economically important to Vietnamese-Americans whose livelihoods rely on commercial and subsistence fishing. Working together, residents and scientists will identify and prioritize target species and biological endpoints. The findings of the study will provide sound data that form the basis for hypothesis-driven future research on the long-term ecological impacts of the disaster. The sociological study will investigate the lay/expert collaboration for insight into the causal processes that generate successful citizen science.
Potential Broader Impacts
The interdisciplinary knowledge produced by this study will aid in scientific efforts to investigate the social and environmental impacts of the oil disaster by capturing time-sensitive social and ecological data that can be used by other natural and social scientists. The community-driven nature of the project and contributions to knowledge production by an underrepresented social group helps ensure that the scientific knowledge will be socially meaningful to Gulf Coast residents and local governments as well state and federal agencies working to mitigate disaster impacts. The project also holds significant educational opportunities. These include opportunities for interdisciplinary exchanges between social and natural scientists, and research training opportunities for undergraduate students and adult non-scientists. The project will also enhance institutional relationships between Tulane and Washington State Universities that bridge regional and public/private divides in the academy. Finally, the proposed study has strong potential to seed an effective and sustainable community-academic network for addressing ecological and environmental health issues in south Louisiana and elsewhere.
Intellectual Merit Our central aim in this study is to deepen understanding of the environmental and human health impacts of the BP oil spill disaster on an atypically vulnerable population: Vietnamese-Americans living in Southeastern Louisiana. This immigrant community is highly dependent on fishing and shrimping, with deep historical, cultural, and economic ties to the seafood industry. Vietnamese-Americans are also among the more geographically and culturally isolated populations in the New Orleans metropolitan area. Five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the community, situated on the eastern edge of the city, the BP oil spill disaster struck with particular ferocity. We took a collaborative, participatory approach in working with community residents and organizers to develop and carry out the research project. As developed over the past two years, the study targeted Gulf white shrimp – a major economic seafood species for the Vietnamese-American community. Guided by shrimpers who served as research partners, shrimp were harvested, pooled into samples, and subjected to chemical analysis for the presence of 81 specific petroleum hydrocarbons. Our community-based research team also developed and implemented two community surveys. The first survey focused on residents’ economic impacts to residents as well as residents’ risk perceptions and risk-related behaviors (e.g. subsistence fishing). The second community survey sought more specific information about shrimp consumption prior to, during, and after the oil spill disaster. By combining data from the two community surveys and the chemical analysis of gulf shrimp, we are able to produce a population-specific risk assessment analysis – the first and only one of its kind to date. Broader Impacts Our project advances a new set of methods and objectives for environmental health and social science research in the context of disasters. It offers an analysis of the opportunities and challenges facing collaborative research projects undertaken in the context of a large-scale technological disaster that spawns ecological uncertainty and economic crisis. Our project has also identified knowledge gaps in regulatory toxicology as it relates to policy action and community perceptions of experts and the knowledge that those experts produce and communicate.
