Learning in Crisis: Training students to monitor and address irresponsible knowledge construction by U.S. federal agencies under Trump.

Abstract

Immediately after President Trump’s inauguration, U.S. federal science agencies began deleting information about climate change from their websites, triggering alarm among scientists, environmental activists, and journalists about the administration’s attempt to suppress information about climate change and promulgate climate denialism. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) was founded in late 2016 to build a multidisciplinary collaboration of scholars and volunteers who could monitor the Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulations and science deemed harmful to its industrial and ideological interests. One of EDGI’s main initiatives has been training activists and volunteers to monitor federal agency websites to identify how the climate-denialist ideology is affecting public debate and science policy. In this paper, we explain how EDGI’s web-monitoring protocols are being incorporated into college curricula. Students are trained how to use the open-source online platforms that EDGI has created, but are also trained in how to analyze changes, determine whether they are significant, and contextualize them for a public audience. In this way, EDGI’s work grows out of STS work on “critical making” and “making and doing.” We propose that web-monitoring exemplifies an STS approach to responsive and responsible knowledge production that demands a more transparent and trustworthy relationship between the state and the public. EDGI’s work shows how STS scholars can establish new modes of engagement with the state, and create spaces where the public can not only define and demand responsible knowledge practices, but also participate in the process of creating STS inspired forms of careful, collective and public knowledge construction.

Introduction

Following President Donald Trump’s inauguration, U.S. federal science agencies immediately began scrubbing information about climate change from their websites. In some cases, text about climate change was altered, but in more extreme cases, entire sections of federal websites were removed. For instance, in April 2017 the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] removed its subdomain “epa.gov/climatechange” and it has not been relaunched (EDGI 2018). The EPA explains these changes as consistent with “the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and [former] Administrator Scott Pruitt” (EPA 2017). Many scientists, environmental activists, and journalists expressed alarm about the Trump administration’s effort to suppress information about climate change (Carter et al. 2017). In late 2016, a multidisciplinary group of STS scholars, scientists, programmers, and professionals established the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) out of concern “that vital environmental data and other information from government websites might be erased or altered, as well as a general concern about the future of...environment-related agencies” (EDGI 2019). A major EDGI initiative is monitoring federal websites for changes to information about the environment, energy, and climate change, in order to track corporate influence over science policy and the promulgation of climate denialism (Oreskes and Conway 2010; EDGI 2018). EDGI’s web-monitoring team developed methods for tracking federal website changes, training people to web-monitor (so they know which websites to monitor and how to interpret and contextualize any changes), allowing the group to document the impacts that the Trump administration’s ideology is having on public environmental information.

The climate denial movement is, in many ways, the apex of corporate influence over knowledge-making; the Trump administration’s deletion of information about the climate crisis highlights the dramatic ways that corporate actors and the state are using the internet to shape public debate and policy. Amidst the converging crises of climate change and disinformation, EDGI’s web-monitoring illustrates how STS can raise and address “matters of public concern” by developing new systems for accountable knowledge construction (cf Latour 2004). Analyzing a spring 2019 Northeastern University graduate “Society, Health and the Environment” class’s experience of EDGI’s web-monitoring as a form of “critical making” and “making and doing” in STS, we propose that it exemplifies an STS approach to responsive and responsible knowledge production that demands a more transparent and trustworthy relationship between the state and the public (Ratto et al. 2014; Downey and Zuiderent-Jerak 2017). Bringing these tools into the classroom can give students skills to assess the state’s practices of disinformation, foster critical thinking and combat the sense of futility often experienced when learning about entrenched power asymmetries and issues such as climate change (Rinberg et al. 2018). Organizations such as EDGI are helping to establish new modes of engagement with the state, and making spaces where the public can not only define and demand responsible knowledge practices, but also participate in the process of creating that knowledge.

EDGI and Critical Making

EDGI’s work is propelled in part by STS scholarship on critical making and “making and doing,” which highlights the importance of moving beyond traditional academic boundaries, hierarchies, and norms to actively build alternative forms of technoscience. Ratto, Wylie, and Jalbert define critical making as “a research program that explores the range of practices and perspectives connecting conceptual critique and material practice… the impetus for this endeavor comes from the idea that technoscience… requires the development of new relationships between traditional forms of critique and critiques [that are] embedded in material interventions” (2014: 86). To approach research as an activity that extracts knowledge from the material world and produces written outputs solely for elite audiences is, in this light, inherently limited: researchers are not outside of their material worlds but entangled in them. Therefore, as well as writing about the politics enacted by technical systems, scholars can actively remake socio-technical systems with alternative politics.

Critical making can also change pedagogy or teaching by practically illustrating how social relationships are configured in part through technical systems, particularly those that create and sustain power asymmetries. While lectures, examinations, and paper writing have merits, an overreliance on them can lead to abstraction, busy work, or—more troubling—apathy and disempowerment, as they do not provide students with the opportunity to disrupt the forces that create inequity. This is particularly salient in teaching about climate denial, environmental injustice, and the lived reality of health disparities where students can become despondent, particularly if they repetitively learn they are part of marginalized, “harmed” communities (Tuck 2009). Teaching STS through critical making can engage students as agents in the deconstruction and reconstruction of knowledge production.

Kenny, Liboiron, and Wylie (2014) piloted this approach with a project where students built thermal flashlights whose light color changes according to the temperature of the surface they illuminate. Students in two different universities used them to paint thermal data visually into their environments. Their self-guided thermal flashlight investigations developed new knowledge about subjects not typically considered political, such as campus food safety, campus energy use, and the local power plant. This project allowed “students and instructors [to] ‘see’ and investigate power relations within technical systems of which they may not have been previously very aware” (2014: 4). Whereas the thermal flashlight allowed students to make new knowledge about their environments, EDGI’s web-monitoring is enabling students to make knowledge about the state.

EDGI’s web-monitoring exemplifies critical making and engaged pedagogy in four ways. First, web-monitoring moves beyond arguing that the federal government should have a coherent web history, by developing and enacting a socio-technical system that actively helps to make one. Second, EDGI is a novel integration of multi-sited academic-public research supported by a non-profit umbrella. EDGI’s web-monitoring would not be possible without the social organization of over 150 people at multiple institutions and online platforms that create open and democratic collaboration among academics, programmers, librarians, business people, non-profit researchers, geographers, and many volunteers (Kimura & Kinchy, 2016; Vera et al. 2019). Third, EDGI has created novel knowledge validation routines for web-monitoring analysts to identify, contextualize, and rapidly report their findings. As described below, this included a collaborative vetting process to determine a change’s significance, as well as presenting time-date stamped evidence that anyone can inspect. Fourth, EDGI has accelerated knowledge production—a crucial point, given how quickly the Trump administration has curtailed dissemination of knowledge that is harmful to its industrial and ideological interests. EDGI’s rapid response has informed hundreds of news articles and allowed journalists to bring changes to the public’s attention almost as soon as they occur, and produced questions that require lengthier research investigations (Knutson et al. 2018; Braun et al. 2019). In sum, EDGI exemplifies collaborative critical learning and making in the midst of these crises, where the organization is actively figuring out new forms of public knowledge production suited to this rapidly changing socio-political environment in which the state limits public access to information and creates disinformation.

Pedagogy in Action

EDGI’s web-monitoring uses Scanner, an open-source custom-built online platform that allows users to simultaneously view side-by-side snapshots of a webpage as it appeared at two different times. These snapshots are recorded by a commercial system—Versionista or the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (see Figure 2). Text or links that have been removed are highlighted in red and items that have been added are highlighted in green.

Figure 2.

Scanner - EDGI’s Website Monitoring Platform

Web-monitoring analysts are assigned a domain, and each week Scanner generates a spreadsheet that provides automated details about text differences and preliminary assessments of their importance in each domain (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Snapshot of Scanner’s tabular output. From this spreadsheet, users can navigate to Scanner for side by side visual inspection

Web-monitoring analysts review pages flagged in Scanner by comparing the before and after versions, log results in an individual analyst spreadsheet and document any major changes in a collaborative “important changes” document (see Figure 4). Sometimes the changes made are clearly insignificant (e.g., changes to the date of the page’s last update), but at other times changes are clearly quite significant (e.g., removal of whole webpages). Many cases fall between these extremes and analysts must assess and contextualize the changes when reporting them. The assessment of “significance” is one of the most important and debated challenges within EDGI’s web-monitoring team. It brings alive STS questions of which knowledge counts for whom and when and highlights the problem of whether a change can speak for itself or whether its meaning is interpretable only in a particular socio-political context. Significant changes must be selected from a shifting and at present unknowable morass of federal websites—there is no map of all federal websites, and EDGI watches a subset of ~25,000 websites. Based on the subsection that EDGI has selected to follow, the web-monitoring team identifies changes that seem important based on analysts’ prior knowledge of issues such as climate denial. Hence the slippery threshold between “evidence” and “interpretation” is negotiated collectively on a case-by-case basis rather than by following a prescribed template or “objective” view of a coherent whole. EDGI’s web-monitoring community works through the online collaboration and chat software Slack and meets weekly online, so new web-monitoring analysts work with more experienced analysts to learn what types of changes are likely to be significant and how to contextualize them for a public audience.

Figure 4.

Snapshot of EDGI’s “Important Changes” document.

Two classes have now integrated web-monitoring into their curriculum—a course “Knowing Climate Change” on community-engaged research at the University of Michigan and a graduate and undergraduate seminar in Environment, Health, and Society at Northeastern University. EDGI’s platform pushed students to develop both individual and collective responsibility for their research. For the Northeastern course each student was assigned a federal government domain and reported results to the group weekly. The syllabus included readings from STS, sociology, anthropology, and public health, and covered a range of topics such as environmental justice, state surveillance, consumer society, the manipulation of media, and data justice (see syllabus here). Along with weekly readings, students participated in web-monitoring and communicated with others in EDGI’s network. Each person identified changes on the sites they were monitoring, thus creating new knowledge about the state’s information and disinformation practices.

Web-monitoring put students in the position of identifying unique new knowledge about the state at the same time that they were learning about the historical symbiotic relationship between the state and corporate sector, and how the state-corporate nexus has a long tradition of extractive research to make knowledge about people as citizens and consumers. As one student of this class describes: “As an undergrad sociology student, the opportunity to participate in web-monitoring with the diverse body of EDGI members was one of the first instances I had to escape the often transactional and disempowering nature of a traditional college curriculum. More than just a student working toward a grade, I was an accountable member of a professional community — of a movement — which relied on my diligent and critical efforts. I was an active defender against corporate influence over democratic processes, a maker of knowledge” (Cole Alder, Northeastern undergraduate 2019). Students who took the University of Michigan course had similar experiences, highlighting how monitoring websites in conjunction with coursework helped them to make connections between environmental problems they studied and ongoing problems related to climate change and Superfund sites. In a podcast discussing their class, the students described how they were able to connect issues of the past such as the Love Canal incident in Niagara, NY with the water crisis in Flint, MI, and to connect issues of legacy and current pollution with the threat of climate change, all in the context of efforts by the current administration to downplay both threats (WCBN 2018).

One student in the Northeastern University class monitored the Department of the Interior (DOI), which updated its website to reflect the nomination of new DOI Secretary David Bernhardt (who replaced the controversial Secretary Zinke in late 2018). Notably, Bernhardt’s official bio omitted information about his potential conflicts of interest (due to his many years of work for fossil fuel and other industries). The student posted a blog about the DOI’s presentation of Bernhardt that was viewed over 11,000 times on Twitter during his nomination hearings. The post raised the underlying question of the state’s duty to accurately present officials’ backgrounds so that the public may adequately assess their actions and potential conflicts. While it did not and could not prevent his nomination, this post did generate important public conversation about an otherwise undiscussed aspect of this controversy.

Beyond pointing out omissions and changes to public knowledge, web-monitoring is helping to conceptualize how federal websites should be managed. Another student from Northeastern University helped to develop a preliminary set of recommendations for better federal archiving and web mapping practices based on her own experience monitoring the globalchange.gov domain. There are currently minimal regulations regarding the alteration or removal of content or data hosted on government websites. In collaboration with EDGI, the student developed ten recommendations to improve federal web archiving and mapping practices. These included a call for citations for empirical statements and data, statements of authorship, the publication of data on the civic uses of federal websites, and the creation of a “changelog” to offer public information about when, where, and why changes to federal websites are made. These guidelines are being further developed within EDGI, which plans to publish them and help improve government website management standards.

Conclusion

Critical making and engaged pedagogy are about more than simply acquiring specific skills. EDGI puts critical making into action because of an urgent need to challenge the current anti-democratic moment and to address public matters of concern. EDGI’s web-monitoring exemplifies work that bridges the gaps that usually separate academics and the public, and makes possible collaborative, networked futures. The students in the classes we describe here engaged directly in defining responsible construction of knowledge, and even went a step further by creating new knowledge about the state’s disinformation practices. EDGI’s web-monitoring has informed hundreds of news articles, active public debates on Twitter and as E&E News reports an EPA staffer said: “No one is willing to touch the website because everyone’s afraid of the news stories that say, ‘EPA changed this.’” This work actively turns the surveillance paradigm on its head, enabling the public to monitor its state rather than being only subject to intrusive data gathering by states and companies (Foucault 1995; Vaidhyanathan 2011; Denick et al. 2016). But EDGI and the Northeastern class ended the semester interested in asking how can this be more than Foucauldian surveillance leading to infinite cycles of paranoia and power-plays? How can the work of EDGI be part of developing new practices of collaborative care for our knowledge production as STS researchers are calling for? (Haraway 2003) Puig de la Bellacasa fittingly describes care as “a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labor” (2012: 197). EDGI helps realize the practical labor side of this ethical obligation to responsibly produce and share knowledge about our collective conditions.

Scientific knowledge production was hardly innocent and harmless before the advent of Trump, so how can STS inform the development of more responsive, responsible and careful knowledge production? (Murphy 2017; Braun 2014; Smith 2012) EDGI argues it is leading the way in both conceptualizing and enacting different ways of collective knowing (Denick et al. 2016; Taylor 2017). In that spirit we end with an invitation for others teaching STS, who might also be struggling in this current climate to muddle your way through lectures as youth are striking in the streets and students are visibly dismayed, to try web-monitoring in your classes. Come help us figure out new ways of learning together in these crises that in their underlying motivation and collective action express care for how we make and share knowledge, that use digital systems to improve rather than impair our collective memories and aim to realize more just, equitable and less harmful states.

Figure 1.

CNN reports on EDGI’s findings related to federal government websites’ use of terms such as climate change and renewable energy.