Building Knowledge Infrastructures for Empowerment: A Study of Grassroots Water Monitoring Networks in the Marcellus Shale

This paper characterizes the activities of two nongovernmental environmental monitoring networks working to protect watersheds in the Northeast United States from the impacts of shale oil and gas extraction. The first is a grassroots coalition of advocacy groups. The second is a large network managed by academic institutions. In both cases, knowledge infrastructures were built to distribute resources and to assist members in using data to make scientific claims. I find that the designs of these knowledge infrastructures can reproduce entrenched dynamics of power in ways that advance the agendas of some stakeholders more than others. However, findings also suggest that the ‘grassroots’ of infrastructures can tactically alter power relationships and redistribute resources to their advantage. By bringing a discourse of power and empowerment into the study of knowledge infrastructures, this paper offers a theoretical contribution to better understand the conditions by which marginalized stakeholders shape knowledge work to deal with complex scientific and environmental problems. Keywords: Knowledge infrastructures, public empowerment, citizen science, environmental justic

Promising Data for Public Empowerment: The Making of Data Culture and Water Monitoring Infrastructures in the Marcellus Shale Gas Rush

A recent wave of advanced technologies for collecting and interpreting data offer new opportunities for laypeople to contribute to environmental monitoring science. This dissertation examines the conditions in which building knowledge infrastructures and embracing data “cultures” empowers and disempowers communities to challenge polluting industries. The processes and technologies of data cultures give people new capacities to understand their world, and to formulate powerful scientific arguments. However, data cultures also make many aspects of social life invisible, and elevate quantitative objective analysis over situated, subjective observation. This study finds that data cultures can empower communities when concerned citizens are equal contributors to research partnerships; ones that enable them to advocate for more nuanced data cultures permitting of structural critiques of status-quo environmental governance. These arguments are developed through an ethnographic study of participatory watershed monitoring projects that seek to document the impacts of shale gas extraction in Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia. Energy companies are drilling for natural gas using highly controversial methods of extraction known as hydraulic fracturing. Growing evidence suggests that nearby watersheds can be impacted by a myriad of extraction related problems including seepage from damaged gas well casing, improper waste disposal, trucking accidents, and the underground migration of hydraulic fracking fluids. In response to these risks, numerous organizations are coordinating and carrying out participatory water monitoring efforts. All of these projects embrace data culture in different ways. Each monitoring project has furthermore constructed its own unique infrastructure to support the sharing, aggregation, and analysis of environmental data. Differences in data culture investments and infrastructure building make some projects more effective than others in empowering affected communities. Four key aspects of these infrastructures are consequential to data culture formations and affordances: 1) the development of standardized monitoring protocols, 2) the politics of data collection technologies, 3) the frictions of database management systems, and 4) the power dynamics of organizational partnerships that come together around water monitoring efforts. Lessons from this analysis should inform future efforts to build infrastructures that address problems of environmental pollution in ways that also generate long-term capacity for empowering at-risk communities

The Civic Informatics of FracTracker Alliance: Working with Communities to Understand the Unconventional Oil and Gas Industry

Unconventional oil and gas extraction is fueling a wave of resource development often touted as a new era in US energy independence. However, assessing the true costs of extraction is made difficult by the vastness of the industry and lack of regulatory transparency. This paper addresses efforts to fill knowledge gaps taken up by civil society groups, where the resources produced in these efforts are used to make informed critiques of extraction processes and governance. We focus on one civil society organization, called FracTracker Alliance, which works to enhance public understanding by collecting, interpreting, and visualizing oil and gas data in broad partnerships. Drawing on the concepts of civic science, we suggest that the informational practices of civil society research organizations facilitate critical knowledge flows that we term “civic informatics.” We offer three case studies illustrating how different characteristics of civic informatics enable public-minded research as well as build capacity for political mobilizations. Finally, we suggest that empirical studies of civic informatics and its facilitators offer insights for the study of “engaged” Science and Technologies Studies (STS) that seek to generate new models of science at the intersection of praxis and theory

“Become a Gas Leak Detective!” Evaluating a multigenerational citizen science program for connecting distribution pipelines to energy justice

Buried beneath homes and businesses, pipelines convey an invisible threat: flammable natural gas. Methane gas leaks in distribution pipelines contribute to climate change, damage urban tree canopies, endanger public safety, and burden ratepayers financially. Despite this, residents often lack the ability to interpret the signs of an outdoor urban gas leak and understand its relationship to larger-scale infrastructural decisions. In order to counter information asymmetries between urban residents and utility companies, we present a family-friendly, citizen science curriculum developed by an academic research team and a local climate justice organization which guides users to observe vegetation, read street markings, use their senses, and access existing public databases for finding urban gas leaks in their neighborhoods. Using a scholar-activist, ethnographic walking methodology, we demonstrate how the citizen science program intervenes in the regimes of imperceptibility around urban gas leaks, strengthens Mothers Out Front Worcester\u27s capacity to advocate for energy justice, and helps build a politics of deconfinement in service of an equitable transition off natural gas. © 202