Investigating Inequality in Environmental Exposure

Carrillo Ian, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. David Pellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating inequalities in environmental exposure for under-represented minority (URM) groups. While researchers have quantitatively documented how URM groups are disproportionately exposed to environmental harms, the qualitative forces and mechanisms that underpin this inequality remain underexplored. This project has the potential to create societal benefits by discovering solutions to environmental problems that disproportionately affect URM populations. This project, Investigating Inequality in Environmental Exposure, will advance knowledge within the fields of environmental studies and sociology by exploring how regulations shape the distribution of environmental harms. While the statistical association between race and toxic exposure has been well documented, few studies have examined the social forces that create and sustain these environmental inequalities. In contrast, this project uses qualitative and ethnographic methods to generate explanations for why environmental inequalities persist and why URM populations continue to be disproportionately exposed to environmental harms. This project focuses on a single agricultural industry in which hazardous labor and environmental practices are highly correlated with race. Based on this case study, the project hypothesizes that the following factors are likely to co-construct the context that shapes regulatory enforcement and compliance: 1) farmland characteristics, 2) state capacity, 3) producers' access to credit and technology, 4) labor availability, and 5) market volatility. The research team will collect data through interviews and ethnographic observations with agricultural producers and state regulators. Research findings will illuminate the challenges of improving environmental outcomes for URM populations by providing a comprehensive examination of the origins of environmental problems, bottlenecks that impede solutions, and pathways for resolving problems. There are potentially transformative aspects of the proposed work, which if successful, could generate new knowledge on why URM populations are unevenly exposed to environmental harms, thus laying the groundwork for future scholars to replicate findings, test new hypotheses, and identify relationships in other societies or nations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.