Abstract
Background:
Flint is a site of resistance to neoliberalism specifically because of the actions of Flint residents. The impacts of this organizing are due, in part, to sustained efforts to reimagine how communities can contribute to scientific knowledge production. We argue that Flint residents' efforts to advance a community-driven research (CDR) agenda represent an important and successful resistance to neoliberal scientific regulatory practices.
Methods:
We present Flint as a case study in CDR as a form of resistance. This article uses participatory observation within community-based research and draws from the personal experiences of the research team as long-term and lifelong residents of Flint who were actively involved in different aspects of community mobilizing during the water crisis.
Case Study:
We highlight Flint's rich and sustained community-based participatory research history, resident-led data collection efforts to assess the environmental and health conditions, a resident-led effort to tell the story of the water crisis from the residents' perspective, and recent efforts to develop and advance a CDR model.
Discussion:
Community-led research efforts in Flint follow Leitner et al.'s typology of contesting neoliberalism through opting in to neoliberal science to advance community needs, collecting data to support direct opposition through protest and mobilization, creating alternative knowledge frames, and using CDR to disengage from the traditional scientific model.
Conclusions:
Through CDR, Flint residents work in direct resistance to the tacit integration of neoliberal values into science and alternatively advance community organizing as a key aspect of science toward environmental justice.
Keywords: environmental justice, community based participatory research, community driven research, citizen science, expertise
INTRODUCTION
The Flint water crisis has been described as an example of racialized neoliberal violence meted out on a majority Black city through mechanisms of austerity and political abandonment.1,2,3,4,5 Flint is also an important site of resistance to neoliberalism because mobilization by Flint residents raised (inter)national attention to the harmful austerity measures on the water system and the city; it became an exemplar for the impacts of racial capitalism in America; it challenged the current regulatory/public health regime by reasserting lead in water as a public health priority; and it helped to highlight the importance of federal investment in infrastructure.
While many have credited citizen science and a few lone experts for these impacts,6 we argue that Flint presents a unique challenge to neoliberal regulatory practices through the city's long history in community organizing, (Black) leadership in community-based participatory research (CBPR), and its critical mass of people interested in working toward a new model for answering questions about the environment and public health.
In this article, we show how Flint contributes to our understanding of neoliberal resistance both theoretically and empirically. First, although citizen science efforts were important in initially making some of the water problems in Flint known, through the review of literature, we show how citizen science without attention to community organizing is not enough to advance environmental justice.
Second, we present Flint as a case study to highlight some of the community science efforts in Flint, which show the community's long history of using science toward equity and social change. We discuss how these actions operate within a complex terrain and do not always reject neoliberal principles, but ultimately pose an important alternative praxis to neoliberal science toward advancing environmental justice.
Popularized during the 1980s through the economic policies of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism stresses individual responsibility, economic deregulation, and devolution of decision making away from central government structures. While hegemonic, neoliberalism has become a somewhat catchall for critical concepts related to late capitalism. Hess argues that by adopting a field perspective, neoliberalism can be understood to operate within a competing terrain of ideologies, policies, practices, and agents, which may resist and reinforce neoliberalism in different ways and in different situations.7
This approach is helpful for understanding the ways in which different approaches to and perspectives on science can be both resisting and reinforcing neoliberalism. In the case of environmental justice, the connection between neoliberalism and science is critical for understanding mechanisms that reinforce the controlled distribution of knowledge about environmental hazards and any potential risks faced by vulnerable communities.
As neoliberalism takes resources away from regulatory bodies, there is growing reliance upon academic scientific experts and volunteer data collection to ensure regulatory compliance.8,9 Academic scientists brought in to study and monitor regulated environments are not there to interrogate issues that have already been settled through political processes, but are partners with state officials and corporations in monitoring environmental and health hazards.10
These political processes determine the reasonable level of control given the increasing costs of surveillance and difficulty of removing some types of contaminants. Importantly, regulations are not necessarily based on health criteria, such as in the case of lead where there is no known safe level of exposure.11,12 This contradiction between cost and health-based standards becomes even more important when a market logic of full cost recovery in public service provisioning takes hold, as the cost of protecting the health of the most vulnerable is put back upon low-income ratepayers.
U.S. regulations ground their rationale and legitimacy through scientific justifications.13 Framing challenges from a single perspective that claims to be rational and apolitical constrains contested issues that are deeply political.14 Science is asserted to be objective and disinterested, making it the appropriate mechanism for informing important policy decisions regarding environmental management.
Under neoliberalism, however, fewer government resources are available to fund scientific research and scientists are often reliant on external funding to carry out research.15,16 Partnerships with regulatory bodies and regulated entities are increasingly recognized as valid, objective, and the norm and are rewarded within academic institutions through tenure, promotion, awards, and recognition.
Scientific partnerships with community members, on the other hand, may be regarded as scientific activism and not real science.17,18,19 Science does not operate from nowhere, but instead offers only a partial view of complex social, material, and historicized systems, which is affected by the positionality of those determining what and how questions get asked.20,21
Citizen science has been offered as a potential mechanism for increasing scientific accountability and openness.22 Loosely, citizen science projects can be divided into two camps.23 Ones that use the public as an economical source of data collection are more likely to synergize with neoliberal impulses that reduce government funding for science.24 Alternatively, efforts that work to democratize science and develop different lines of inquiry by including the public throughout the knowledge production process may offer an important mechanism for challenging neoliberal regulatory science.25,26,27,28
However, citizen science in general is not so easily pinned down, with some projects simultaneously supporting increasing access to knowledge while also affirming scientism and capitalist regulatory management.29
Resistance to neoliberalism is difficult as neoliberalism evolves across time, scale, and space.30 Leitner et al. describe how contestations of neoliberalism can include (1) engagement through opting in to neoliberal processes as a way to advance community concerns within a power structure; (2) opposition through direct protest and mobilization to bring about social and political change; (3) creating alternative knowledge through asserting alternative interpretations, lines of inquiry, and possibilities for change; and (4) disengagement through creating separate structures outside of neoliberal spaces and systems.31
Importantly, resistance efforts to neoliberalism may have unintended consequences that reinforce neoliberalism in unexpected or uncritically examined ways.32
Communities facing environmental justice challenges may wish to engage with academic researchers because scientific research can offer credibility to their claims33 and provide them with the tools to gather data about concerns that would not otherwise be investigated.34 While citizen science may gather important data helpful to regulatory intervention, without valuing the concerns and intellectual contributions of the public or attention to questions of power and democratic accountability, citizen science efforts serve to reinforce processes of scientization and entrenched neoliberal ideology.35
This tension becomes more pronounced when the expectation of a community conflicts with that of partner academic scientists about their approach to citizen science, as happened in Flint. The well-known case of citizen science during the Flint water crisis ultimately devolved into a $3 million lawsuit filed by an academic researcher against one of the leading community organizers.36,37 The celebrated citizen science efforts in Flint emphasized community organizing to collect data, but the outside academic expert asserted control over scientific interpretations and significance.38
Public participation in the scientific process is an important aspect of resisting neoliberal regulatory regimes of knowledge, but citizen science is insufficient on its own to be a mechanism of resistance.
First, even with well-intentioned, reflexive academic partners, constrained disciplinary and embodied worldviews limit the ability of diverse actors across stubborn power differentials to work toward the sincere priorities of a heterogeneous community. This can lead inquiries to areas familiar to or comfortable for the expertise of academic partners. Citizen science aligned with CBPR values may advocate for equity in research and shared leadership of scientific inquiries,39 but equity in research between academics and community members retains the centering of academics as knowledge gatekeepers.40
Second, the adoption of scientific language for a complex problem shifts the discourse to issues manageable by science, such as availability of data, methods of data collection, and hypothesis testing, and away from issues of public concern such as power inequities and structural violence.41,42,43
Third, data collection becomes an end to itself where the problem becomes about reaching an impossible goal of having sufficient data to prove causal relationships in complex environmental systems rather than working toward addressing the underlying economic, structural, and political drivers.44
Fourth, environmental monitoring activities that draw upon citizen science data are not typically designed in such a way that they are able to address the structural causes of environmental inequities.45,46,47 Science is invested in its own reproduction, not social transformation.48
Finally, community members may engage in citizen science activities that work to produce their own data about community concerns, either to contest official data or to provide data where they are lacking, but even with well-collected scientific data, public officials are able to draw upon mechanisms that allow them to ignore and discount the input of the public.49
These limitations to citizen science as a means of working toward environmental justice point to the conclusion that data collection is insufficient without community organizing.50 Community organizing is, generally, not valued as a key component of science. Even CBPR, which celebrates the inclusion of community members in the research process, views true community-driven science as an ideal type—laudable, but typically unattainable.51
The significant impacts of the Flint water crisis in curtailing the water management policies implemented under emergency management—becoming a beacon for environmental justice across the world, spurring the public health community to reconsider the importance of lead in water, and bringing the need for federal investment in infrastructure into public conversation across the country—constitute a profound case of resistance to neoliberalism in the United States.
We argue these outcomes were made possible through Flint's legacy of mobilization where residents have worked to disrupt entrenched power structures and advance scientific and regulatory processes that center public welfare and social justice. To this end, in this article, we trace the actions of Flint residents to participate in community-level data collection, organize community science efforts, and advance a community-driven research (CDR) agenda.
METHODS
The case development for this article derives from participatory observation by the research team within multiple and sustained community-based research projects. The data are drawn from personal experiences of the research team as long-term and lifelong residents of Flint who were actively involved in different aspects of community mobilizing during the water crisis. Except for Dr. Carrera who is a sociologist at Michigan State University (MSU), all members of the research team are Flint residents.
Carrera has been engaged with Flint and connected to Dr. Rev Bailey since early 2015 when Carrera was invited to be part of an investigation into community members' concerns about water quality. Carrera served on a public health panel for the University of Michigan (UM)–Flint's Flint Water Course with Key in early 2016 and was later invited by Key to be part of a team of community members and academic partners working to assemble a narrative of the Flint water crisis from the residents' perspective.52
Dr. Key is a lifelong Flint resident and a public health disparities researcher. Bailey, Pastor Watkins, Key, and Pastor Wiggins are all faith leaders in the Flint community. Bailey is a member of Community-Based Organization Partners (CBOP) and the Community Ethics Review Board (CERB) and works to support increasing involvement of the faith community in research and public health.
Dr. Sullivan is professor of mechanical engineering at Kettering University, served on the Flint Water Interagency Coordinating Committee, and has testified as an expert witness on the Flint water crisis. Mays is the Founder of Water You Fighting For (WYFF), an organizer for Flint Rising, and a plaintiff in Mays v. Snyder and Mays v. Flint, class action lawsuits related to damages incurred due to the Flint water crisis.
The research team, consisting of six Flint residents (the Action Council) and Dr. Carrera, came together as a collective in 2018 to conduct research associated with Carrera's National Institutes of Health (NIH) Transition to Independent Environmental Health Research (TIEHR) Career Award (K01ES029115). Funding for the K01 project was extended through 2022 due to COVID-19 and the activities of the research team are ongoing.
As this article explores the activities of multiple research projects and their connection to community resistance, more details of our research methods, which would traditionally appear in the Methods section, are presented in the Case Study section. As we will discuss, the methods themselves are an important aspect of Flint's resistance to the neoliberalism of science.
Case study
Flint's 30-year CBPR history
Flint's engagement in research leadership dates to the early 1990s when Flint residents participated in the W. K. Kellogg Foundation's Community-Based Public Health Initiative (CBPHI), which aimed to create a new frame for supporting collaborative efforts between public health researchers and community members. While the CBPHI laid the foundation for flourishing of CBPR, many of the original residents who participated in this initiative were not credited for their intellectual contributions to this legacy. This was, in part, because coauthorship on peer-reviewed academic journals was not a priority for community activists at the time.
Flint community members originally involved with the CBPHI, such as Mrs. E. Hill DeLoney, continued to organize and, in 1994, they brought local organizations together under the CBOP umbrella to coordinate and empower community engagement in public health research.53,54 Today, Mrs. DeLoney serves as CBOP's Executive Director. In 2009, Executive Deputy Director of CBOP, Key, founded the CERB to provide community-level oversight of research projects funneled through Flint.55
The Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center (HFRCC) was founded in 2016 to manage the glut of researchers flocking to Flint during the water crisis.56 As a partnership between MSU, UM-Ann Arbor, UM-Flint, CBOP, and the National Center for African American Health Consciousness, the HFRCC channeled researchers to the CERB, provided information about projects in Flint to reduce duplication and research fatigue, and supported community reporting through presentations, data sharing, and bidirectional learning.
The HFRCC maintains a directory of 155 research projects that it has helped to funnel to community leaders. Through the CERB, Flint residents assert community-level oversight of academic research and advocate for community benefit.
Community-level data collection
At the start of the water crisis, residents were already working to gather data from neighbors to understand the scope and character of the problems from the water switch. Residents organized community meetings to raise awareness and share their experiences and concerns about the water system. Beginning in early 2015, Melissa and Adam Mays created a website for WYFF to collect information about water quality (taste, odor, and color), health concerns, and rates.
The information gathered was largely qualitative, bringing together the firsthand experiences and stories of residents as they described encounters with the water system. Matched with pictures, this information was plotted by M. Mays onto a map of the city to visually display the experience of the city's residents with the water system.57
The map was shown at public speaking events, taken to the governor's office, and shown as evidence during the court cases. The map provided a compelling community-level spatial narrative about the experiences of Flint residents with the water system. Mays credits the map as helpful in getting the state to donate 1500 tap filters to Flint residents.
Community science
In 2015 and 2016, Flint experienced an all-hands-on-deck moment with community meetings organized frequently and widely across the city. As a health disparities researcher, Key attended dozens of community meetings in solidarity and to listen to the concerns of the residents. Key observed a discrepancy with the media's representation of the community's needs, priorities, and actors working to solve Flint's water problems.
Through his leadership in CBOP, Key coalesced a group of residents and supportive academics who were interested in elevating the Flint water story as told by the residents. This team included roughly twenty Flint residents and invited academic partners. With some funds from the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR) at the UM, Bailey, Mrs. DeLoney, and Key organized to gather the information being shared by Flint residents.
Later, this work evolved into a deliberate investigation into the story of the water crisis as understood by Flint residents. Complementing transcripts of seventeen public meetings, the team hosted focus groups (n = 149) across demographic groups to explore the representative voices of the community. More about this study is described in Carrera et al. (2019).58 These efforts were led by CBOP and approved by the CERB, as well as the UM and MSU IRBs.
Results from this analysis were described in a report entitled, “Community Voice on the Flint Water Crisis: A Trust Study, Needs Assessment, and Plan of Action,” which was presented and discussed in a town hall meeting in Flint on September 23, 2019. Leading from this work, Key successfully advocated with Nayyirah Shariff to have Genesee County declare in June 2020 that racism is a public health issue.
Of particular importance for this discussion, first, the study highlighted the rich history of community organizing around science in Flint, which provided the foundation for the CBPR efforts, which emerged during the water crisis. Second, it offered a model for CDR, through what the team called community science, wherein the community was centered as the key unit of analysis for understanding scientific relationships, as opposed to academic versus community framings.
While typical CBPR places equity between academia and community, suggesting that academic knowledge is held outside of the community space, the team's community science model positioned the community as a heterogeneous group with varied knowledge ranging from embodied to academic knowledge; academics were qualified by their status as a member of the community or not, with noncommunity academic partners serving in supportive roles.
This shift of center represents an important critique not only of academic science broadly but also of CBPR scholarship that can implicitly reinforce power hierarchies despite the best efforts of well-intended individuals.
Community-driven research
After the community science project was well into analysis, Carrera discussed with Bailey and Key the possibility of investigating low-cost technologies for environmental monitoring. They conducted three focus groups across different age groups to have Flint residents weigh in during the planning stages of the NIH TIEHR proposal.
Residents were more interested in communication of risks and planning than technologies for testing, so the team developed a proposal to increase communication among residents through mobile application development. This project was reviewed and approved by MSU's Human Research Protection Program and the CERB.
Designed as a CDR project, the project is coadministered in all its functions with the partnership of six Flint residents who serve on the project's Action Council, which was fully formed in 2018. The term Action Council was chosen by the team to reflect the leadership of all team members, in contrast with traditional community advisory boards where community members may have no power to carry out their recommendations.
Following the community science model developed previously, Carrera serves as a noncommunity academic partner. CDR is a type of CBPR where residents are in full leadership of a project.59 The team meets biweekly and communicates through e-mail as needed. Members of the Action Council not only discuss how to manage the funds of the K01 award but also how to distribute Carrera's startup funds in support of the efforts of the team.
Activities of this project have included focus groups to listen to residents' expertise in responding to an environmental and health crisis (n = 41), dialoguing with residents in water quality workshops about what information is important to share within the community (n = 78), and acting with residents in a pilot effort to develop a mobile application as a tool for sharing data and information within the community (n = 26). An important finding of this project points to a community-derived definition of environmental health literacy (EHL) that grounds the production of EHL in a network of trust and equity, relationally across knowledge producers (i.e., residents, public health professionals, and environmental scientists).
Over the course of the pilot, participants have moved from a perspective that testing is the responsibility of the state to wanting to have their own questions about water quality answered and finally to feeling that community mobilization is a key aspect of data gathering and government accountability. This shift in perspective suggests a potential impact of community involvement in low-cost tools for environmental monitoring.
A significant undertaking for the research team has been the development of shared values, expectations, and a vision for a sustainable future. Over the project, the team has submitted roughly $30 million in funding proposals to foundations and federal agencies. These funding proposals craft an umbrella vision for a coordinated program to advance CDR based on Flint's critical capacity for leadership in environmental justice struggles.
This vision includes working to develop a hub for CDR in Flint that (1) increases the technical capacity of Flint residents to engage in scientific research and technology development, (2) assesses the Flint model for CDR as a national and generalizable model (CDRM) for community leadership in addressing what Frickel et al. call “undone science,”60 and (3) establishes a racial healing pathway for engaging environmental scientists in CDR.
DISCUSSION
Leitner et al.'s typology of resistance to neoliberalism can be seen across various actions to advance community leadership in science in Flint. As residents involved with CBOP, CBPR projects generally, and the authors' research team do not reject science outright, participation in science that is dominated by neoliberal practices represents an opting in to neoliberal science to advance community needs. This is particularly true in the successful pursuit of competitive funding through federal agencies such as the NIH.
Direct opposition through protest and mobilization is core to Flint's response to structural harm. Residents of Flint anchor their mobilization in the city's heritage of labor organizing during the 1936–1937 sit-down strike. Resistance and community organizing is a source of pride for Flint residents. Community organizing is regarded as an essential feature of community-driven science in Flint. Resident data collection was not pursued for the sake of having more data, but to elevate the collective concerns of the community, counter official and expert gaslighting, and as evidence in legal pursuits to change water management practices, end emergency management, and get compensation for residents.
Both collecting Flint residents' observations about the water, rates, and health experiences and mapping them to show impacts across the city and, separately, organizing a steering committee of Flint residents and supportive academics to collect and amplify the residents' understanding of the water crisis represent examples of how Flint residents have worked to create an alternative knowledge frame about the harmful effects of and necessary interventions for the water crisis. These efforts open alternative lines of inquiry, mechanisms of analysis, and interpretations of fundamentally socially embedded and materially consequential results.
These practices of alternative knowledge production also in some ways represent a disengagement from the traditional scientific model for framing environmental justice in Flint. In particular, the efforts to go beyond CBPR to advance a CDRM in Flint (and beyond) mobilize an alternative structure outside of the dominant neoliberal science model. Marginalized communities have few protections to ensure academic accountability, and local government, especially when the authority of that government is undermined as in the case of Flint, is generally not relied upon to ensure community scientific benefits.
Although some indigenous Native American communities are able to assert control over research through strong community connections and tribal sovereignty to expel unwelcome researchers, nontribal communities lack such community cohesion and authority.61 To work toward scientific accountability for environmental justice communities, a system of community leadership, voluntary academic submission, and institutional mechanisms of accountability need to be developed.
As such a system would not displace traditional science, it would serve as an alternative system working toward meaningful equitable change.
Ultimately, CDR in Flint operates within a field of neoliberal science wherein actors, aspects, and processes reinforce some of the tendencies of neoliberalism (such as the pursuit of funding, science as a tool for regulation, and data analysis as an important goal unto itself) while also asserting important resistance and opportunities for transformation (by shifting the dominance of noncommunity academic partners to a supporting role, developing normative pathways for funding communities, and by calling for institutional backing of community leadership and accountability in community-engaged researchers).
A straightforward way for institutions to demonstrate such support would be to require any recipients of funding to demonstrate approval by, sustained partnership with, and accountability to the local CERB.
CONCLUSIONS
Hundreds of researchers found their way to Flint over the course of the water crisis, but as of the time of this writing, CBOP members report that only a handful of researchers remain engaged with the community. Because of declining federal and state investment in public education, research-focused institutions largely reward scholars for pursuing a continuing stream of major grant money to do new research projects.62
This has the impact of both discouraging academics from responding to residents when they first reach out to local universities for help—as there is little available funding to study emergent issues—and encouraging academics to chase funding as it comes for the next politicized event that major awards are directed toward.
Furthermore, with fewer institutional resources, academics more frequently collaborate with corporate and state actors who have more financial resources than communities to support investigations. When academics are collaborators with corporate and state partners in other projects, it is harder to publicly question the credibility of these partners when communities have concerns.
A significant percentage, if not most, of the academics drawn to Flint during the water crisis responded because of their concerns about environmental injustice happening to the community. That many well-intentioned scholars, including those practicing CBPR and citizen science, still ended up offering little to the community beyond extraction raises the question of how well science is positioned to advance the structural changes necessary to address environmental injustice.
Communities may require technical knowledge, testing, advocacy, raising awareness, or full scientific investigations. To work to support the needs of communities, a formal mechanism to allow communities to drive the agenda on their needs is necessary. To work toward advancing social change and environmental justice, Flint's history suggests that this agenda should incorporate community organizing and mobilization as key aspects of doing transformative science.
Through a CDRM, community members provide intellectual contributions to the scientific research process in a way that is disruptive of traditional models of expertise. Through advancing CDR, Flint residents are working in direct resistance to the tacit integration of neoliberal values into ways of doing science. These efforts work to demonstrate an alternative praxis that explores issues of concern for the community with solutions that work toward accountability, democratic governance, and social welfare.
AUTHOR DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No competing financial interests exist.
FUNDING INFORMATION
This work was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Grant/Award Number: 1K01ES029115-01.
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Ibid., Moore et al. (2011).
Ibid., Lave (2012).
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Ibid., Moore et al. (2011).
Sabrina McCormick. “Democratizing Science Movements: A New Framework for Mobilization and Contestation.” Social Studies of Science 37 (2007): 609–623.
Sabrina McCormick. “From ‘Politico-Scientists' to Democratizing Science Movements: The Changing Climate of Citizens and Science.” Organization & Environment 22 (2009): 34–51.
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Ibid., Kinchy et al. (2014).
Ibid., McCauley (2017).
Ibid., Hess (2011).
Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard (eds.). “Squaring up to Neoliberalism,” in Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers (New York: The Guilford Press, 2007), 311–327.
Margit Mayer. “Contesting Neoliberalization of Urban Governance,” in Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, ed. Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard (New York: Guilford Publications, 2007), 90–115.
Sabrina McCormick. “Ecology and Society: After the Cap: Risk Assessment, Citizen Science and Disaster Recovery.” Ecology and Society 17 (2012): 31.
Ibid., Frickel et al. (2010).
Ibid., Kinchy et al. (2014).
Benjamin J. Pauli. “The Flint Water Crisis.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 7 (2020): e1420.
Ibid., Pauli (2021).
Ibid.
Arjen E.J. Wals and Michael A Peters. “Flowers of Resistance: Citizen Science, Ecological Democracy and the Transgressive Education Paradigm,” in Sustainability Science: Key Issues, ed. Ariane König and Jerome Ravetz (London: Routledge, 2017), 29–52.
Carrera, Jennifer S., Kent Key, Sarah Bailey, Joseph A. Hamm, Courtney A. Cuthbertson, E. Yvonne Lewis, Susan J. Woolford, et al. “Community Science as a Pathway for Resilience in Response to a Public Health Crisis in Flint, Michigan.” Social Sciences 8 (2019): 94.
Ibid., McCauley (2017).
Ibid., Moore et al. (2011).
Ibid., Frickel and Vincent (2007).
Nicholas Shapiro, Nassar Zakariya, and Jody A. Roberts. “Beyond the Data Treadmill: Environmental Enumeration, Justice, and Apprehension,” in Toxic Truths: Environmental Justice and Citizen Science in a Post-Truth Age, ed. Thom Davies and Alice Mah (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 301–325.
Ibid., Kimura (2021).
Aya H. Kimura and Abby Kinchy. “Citizen Science: Probing the Virtues and Contexts of Participatory Research.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2 (2016): 331–361.
Ibid., Kinchy et al. (2014).
Ibid., Shapiro et al. (2020).
Ibid., Dhillon (2017).
Giovanna Di Chiro. “Local Actions, Global Visions: Remaking Environmental Expertise,” in Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Sciecne and Social Power, ed. Ron Eglash, Jennifer L. Croissant, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Rayvon Fouché (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 225–252.
Key, Kent D., Debra Furr-Holden, E. Yvonne Lewis, Rebecca Cunningham, Marc A. Zimmerman, Vicki Johnson-Lawrence, and Suzanne Selig. “The Continuum of Community Engagement in Research: A Roadmap for Understanding and Assessing Progress.” Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action 13 (2019): 427–434.
Ibid., Carrera et al. (2019).
Ibid.
Ibid., Carrera et al. (2021).
Key, Kent. “Expanding Ethics Review Processes to Include Community-Level Protections: A Case Study from Flint, Michigan.” AMA Journal of Ethics 19 (2017):989–998.
Ibid., Key et al. (2019).
Water You Fighting For map of health and water quality experiences, as reported by Flint residents. <http://wateryoufightingfor.com/downloads/mapofflintwaternewestoneWEB.png>. (Last accessed on February 15, 2022).
Ibid., Carrera et al. (2019).
Ibid., Key et al. (2019).
Ibid., Frickel et al. (2010).
While the discussion of tribal IRBs is beyond the scope of this article, we acknowledge that tribal IRBs emerged in the context of extreme efforts of scientific extraction and erasure as mechanisms of white settler colonialism. These represent ongoing violence of white supremacy.
Yarden Katz and Ulrich Matter. “Metrics of Inequality: The Concentration of Resources in the U.S. Biomedical Elite.” Science as Culture 29 (2020): 475–502.