The HI Science Studies Research Workshop will host a talk by Scott Frickel of Brown University.

This talk introduces new research that aims to reconstruct a history of soil contamination science and policy and its relationship to broader socio-ecological processes of environmental inequality and urbanization. Set mainly in Providence, Rhode Island the study is anchored in a close analysis of site investigation reports, that have been solicited and managed by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) since the early 1980s. Each report catalogues soil contamination on a particular parcel of land: what sites are contaminated, how RIDEM knows this, and what the agency does about it. Together the reports reveal how one of the environmental state’s most essential regulatory institutions – the site investigation – has operated in practice and over time and across diverse neighborhoods and landscapes. Combining traditional archival research, interviews, and ethnography with new computational techniques in digital humanities, the study promises to reveal how ostensibly public, but largely hidden, epistemic and organizational processes unfolding in law firms, private testing laboratories, planning offices, and real estate markets inscribe the science and policy of soil contamination onto urban landscapes, invisibly structuring the entwined social geographies of environmental inequality, knowledge, and ignorance.

SCOTT FRICKEL
PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY AND DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH AT THE INSTUTUTE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY FOR THE STUDY OF ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY

Scott Frickel is Professor of Sociology and the Institute for the Study of Environment and Society. He holds a Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2000). Before coming to Brown he held faculty appointments at Tulane University and Washington State University, where he was the Boeing Distinguished Professor of Environmental Sociology. His research and teaching interests center on the intersections of nature, knowledge, and politics. A growing feature of his current research involves developing new approaches for identifying and measuring socio-environmental change and developing theories to explain those patterns. He also studies inequality in science and technology and chemical residues as cultural, material, and political objects – both subjects of current book projects. Professor Frickel is the author of five books, mostly recently with James R. Elliott, Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities (Russell Sage Foundation and ASA Rose Series in Sociology, 2018) and an edited volume, with Matthew Albert and Barbara Prainsack, Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

He is founding editor of the Nature, Society and Culture book series published by Rutgers University Press.

For more information, visit https://humanitiesinstitute.buffalo.edu/, or contact Dr. Jordan Fox at jfox22@buffalo.edu