Regulatory Science and Risk Assessment in Indian Country: Taking Tribal Publics into Account

Abstract

Studies of the geography of scientific knowledge production have shown how securing the credibility and objectivity of a scientific claim requires erasing or masking traces of the “local.” In order for a claim to be credible and objective, it needs to be true everywhere, not just in the place it was formulated (Latour, 1987; Law & Mol, 2001; Livingstone, 2003). Otherwise, the claim is doomed to remain “local knowledge”: subjective, place-bound, and unverifiable.