Toxic Truths

Toxic Truths looks at how environmental justice and citizen science relate to each other, with attention to long-standing problems and new challenges in a post-truth age. Arguments about science, facts and values have always been central to environmental justice struggles. For decades, activists have campaigned against the misuse of science while also carrying out community-led citizen science. Post-truth politics now threatens science itself, and this book argues for the importance of science, knowledge and data produced by and for ordinary people who live with environmental risks and hazards.

The contributions are international and interdisciplinary. They range from grassroots struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities to local environmental controversies in Spain and China. They also take up questions of knowledge justice, citizenship, participation and data in citizen science around toxicity. Topics include community-based participatory research on environmental health and justice, different ways of sensing, witnessing and interpreting environmental injustice, political strategies for pursuing justice, and ways of widening the concepts and forms of citizen science engagement worldwide.

The volume brings together distinguished authors in environmental justice with new research from emerging scholars and community activists. It will interest specialists in the social and environmental sciences and is accessible to graduate and postgraduate readers. It is also meant for members of the public concerned with social justice and for community members considering taking part in citizen science and activism.