This project seeks to understand and explain the mechanisms and processes involved in the social production of risk perceptions and in the ebb and flow of environmental protest. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three marginalized and contaminated communities, the project will scrutinize changes over time in shared understandings about toxic risk and in environmental collective action. The research will: a) examine the life-threatening effects of environmental contamination in three highly polluted marginalized communities in the Americas, b) explain the (sometimes puzzling and contradictory) meanings their poor residents ascribe to it, and c) examine the links between shared understandings about contamination and the cycles of mobilization and de-mobilization around environmental matters that these communities have witnessed during the past two decades. The main questions this project will address are the following: How do poor people make sense of (and cope with) toxic danger? When and why do they understand what is objectively a clear and present danger? When and how do shared understandings about threatening pollution trigger collective action?
Broader Impacts
This project will bring together the often dispersed insights that have developed over the past three decades in the study of risk perception, environmental collective action, and urban poverty. In analyzing the relationship between marginality, risk, and contention this research will seek to create intellectual bridges among several areas of study. This work will seek to enrich the discourse in these areas by offering a more comprehensive understanding of environmental suffering and contention, extend the boundaries of these fields to include relevant dynamics borrowed from the others, and advance the intellectual integration of these fields. Doctoral dissertations, academic articles, and a book will be the outcome of this project.
