Careful knowing as an aspect of environmental justice

Abstract

Environmental justice (EJ) issues commonly include contestation over knowledge claims. EJ scholarship tends to theorize these as issues of participation or recognition. Drawing on a long-term ethnography of community-led air monitoring, I show that frontline communities experience distinctly epistemic injustices, even in situations characterized by participation and recognition. These epistemic injustices, which include exclusion from judgment, inadequate epistemic resources, and denial of status as knowers, point to the need to expand definitions of EJ to include an account of epistemic justice. Departing from virtue-based accounts, I propose ‘careful knowing,’ or practices of empirical investigation and meaning-making responsive to the needs of marginalized knowers, as a remedy for epistemic injustices that occur in EJ settings. Context-specific by definition, careful knowing may include grounding epistemic judgments in the need for community health protection, expanding epistemic resources, and bolstering the confidence and status of marginalized knowers.