Energy Research & Social Science xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

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Energy Research & Social Science

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/erss

Original research article

Making sense of citizen science: Stories as a hermeneutic resource

Gwen Ottinger
Department of Politics and Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Drexel University, 3101 Market St., Suite 250, Room 200, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In communities on the front lines of energy facilities, citizen science has been seen as potent tool for environ-
Environmental justice mental justice, giving residents access to quantitative data and, as a result, greater credibility with regulators and
Citizen science other experts. However, as in other realms of energy and environmental policy, greater access to data brings with
Big data it increased interpretive challenges—challenges which are especially acute for environmental justice-oriented
Storytelling
citizen scientists seeking alternatives to scientists’ frameworks for understanding pollution and environmental
Epistemic injustice
health. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s (2007) theory of epistemic injustice, this paper shows that frontline
communities’ struggles to understand air quality data manifest “hermeneutic injustices,” or inequities in re-
sources for meaning-making. Following research showing storytelling as one vehicle for making meaning, it
argues that the stories told by frontline communities—stories of harms to health, systemic danger, dissembling,
and disrespect—can in some circumstances serve as a crucial hermeneutic resource for making sense of air
quality data for which scientific frameworks are inadequate. At the same time, it documents the limits of stories
in giving meaning to data, pointing to areas of “narrative mismatch” which call for further hermeneutic in-
vention by community groups working in collaboration with sympathetic scientists.

1. Introduction
Access to data is often seen as a key ingredient in environmental
protection. Our expanding ability to generate and process data in what
some have called the age of “big data” is seen as having the potential,
for example, to reduce household energy consumption [1] and address
major conservation challenges [2]. Simultaneously, absences of data,
theorized as “knowledge gaps” and “undone science,” have been argued
to be major obstacles to environmental social movements’ ability to
effect change [3,4].
Interest in data is especially intense in U.S. communities on the front
lines of energy production, from sites of extraction, such as un-
conventional natural gas drilling operations, to “midstream” facilities
like oil refineries and processing plants for natural gas liquids, to sites of
electricity generation, including coal, nuclear, and waste-to-energy
plants. In many such communities, concerned citizens groups and allied
environmental non-profits have confronted gaps in relevant data by
collecting their own, using a combination of standardized and invented
instruments [5–7,57]. Frequently, these community-led data-collection
efforts have been accompanied by calls for additional monitoring of
energy facilities by responsible authorities [6,8].
Across these arenas, the expansion of data brings with it the pro-
blem of interpretation. The meaning of data is underdetermined; dif-
ferent conclusions can be drawn from the same data depending on what
frameworks or stories are used to interpret it [9]. For communities on
the front lines of energy production, making sense of expanding da-
ta—even data they themselves collect—is especially challenging. The
added difficulties they face stem from fundamental disconnects be-
tween community and expert ways of knowing environmental hazards
[10]; see also [11,12]: “frontline communities” ask questions that aren’t
being asked by regulatory scientists; they assert the relevance of factors
that aren’t represented in standard scientific paradigms; they call for
different standards of proof. Their citizen science efforts—which this
paper will take to include both data collection and sense-making efforts
around publicly available data—thus exist in large part to offer alter-
natives to hegemonic scientific practices that do not adequately re-
present community experiences. But citizen scientists who wish not to
adopt experts’ interpretive frameworks confront a problem: how should
they make meaning of their data, and make it meaningful to the reg-
ulators and others whom they want to persuade to take action?
In this paper, I ask whether stories told by frontline communities in
the United States about their experiences living in close proximity to
petrochemical polluters—sometimes mere blocks away; in every case
close enough to feel directly affected by pollution—can be a resource
for interpreting data in counter-hegemonic ways. Stories have been
shown to play a role in making meaning of energy and environmental
data in policy settings [9]. Storytelling is also widely recognized as a
powerful core strategy of frontline communities in the environmental
justice (EJ) movement. Yet scholars studying citizen engagement with
data in EJ settings have thus far not focused on the role that story-

E-mail address: ottinger@drexel.edu.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.014
Received 17 November 2016; Received in revised form 1 June 2017; Accepted 4 June 2017
2214-6296/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Ottinger, G., Energy Research & Social Science (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.014
G. Ottinger
telling might play in helping to make meaning—including meanings
that challenge expert interpretations—of that data.
Using a framework of “epistemic injustice” [13] to conceptualize
the work done by citizen science in environmental justice campaigns, I
show that stories can be a powerful interpretive resource for frontline
communities looking to leverage data into advocacy, even in cases
where robust scientific frameworks for understanding the data are
elusive. Drawing on ethnographic research among community air
monitoring advocates, I show how residents of frontline communities
have used their pre-existing narratives of living next to refineries and
other petrochemical facilities to make sense of, and make claims about,
the results of citizen science projects. In a number of cases, I show,
combining stories and data has been a very successful strategy: stories
supported with data—or, to think of it another way, data situated
within stories—have in some cases compelled action to address local
environmental hazards.
At the same time, however, I demonstrate that pre-existing stories
are not a sufficient means of overcoming the interpretive gaps faced by
frontline communities. I point to a series of “narrative mismatches,” in
which stories told about local conditions don’t map on to available data.
In situations of narrative mismatch, I argue, communities may be un-
able to mobilize information that could help to demonstrate the harms
they suffer. Overcoming interpretive gaps in this area will require more
active building of interpretive resources, including through collabora-
tion with sympathetic scientists.
In the next (second) section, I introduce the idea of epistemic in-
justice and its major variants: testimonial injustice, or unfair attribu-
tions of credibility to speakers, and hermeneutic injustice, or structural
disadvantages in access to resources for sense-making. I explain how
epistemic injustices affect communities suffering from environmental
injustices, and how frontline communities’ citizen science efforts re-
present a strategy both for bolstering residents’ credibility in the eyes of
regulators and other experts and—more tenuously—for making sense of
environmental hazards in a way that offers an alternative to expert
interpretations. In Section 3, I discuss narrative as a tool of meaning-
making, both for frontline communities trying to understand and
communicate about their experiences, and for policy actors trying to
contextualize complex, incomplete, and/or uncertain science. The use
of story in science-rich policy environments, I suggest, suggests a likely
parallel in the EJ movement, although the EJ literature has not made
explicit connections between stories and data. Sections 4–6 respectively
introduce the case of community-based air monitoring at energy and
petrochemical facilities, describe my ethnographic methods for
studying EJ-based advocacy for increased air monitoring, and catalog
four kinds of stories common in frontline communities: stories of harms
to health, stories of systemic danger, stories of dissembling, and stories
of disrespect.
Section 7 documents the power of these stories as an interpretive
resource—and partial remedy for hermeneutic injustice—through ex-
amples of communities using them to make sense of, and make politi-
cally powerful, data that resisted interpretation using scientific frame-
works. Section 8 shows their limits, describing a number of narrative
mismatches that have stymied community groups trying to mobilize
potentially powerful data. I conclude by suggesting that the problem of
narrative mismatch is not limited to frontline communities but extends
across energy and climate policy arenas. Making sense of increasingly
voluminous data may require innovations in the stories we tell about
them (c.f. [9,14]—innovations that, I argue, are best pursued in colla-
borations that include community members and/or other so-called
“lay” citizens working alongside scientists willing to go beyond existing
interpretive frames to look for meaning that better represents the
concerns and experiences of frontline communities (c.f. [15,16]).
2. Epistemic injustice and citizen science
As described by philosopher Miranda Fricker [13], epistemic
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injustices occur when individuals from structurally marginalized groups
are wronged in their capacity as knowers. Fricker suggests that epistemic
injustices take two major forms: testimonial and hermeneutic injustice.
Testimonial injustice occurs when a person’s statement or account is
dismissed because of the person’s (structurally disadvantaged) identity:
she is female, for example, or from a racial minority group. Herme-
neutic injustice describes inequities in epistemic resources—the con-
cepts, language, and frameworks that we use to understand situated
experiences and render them visible and comprehensible in the public
discourse [13,17,18]. Epistemic resources are shared throughout a so-
ciety, but marginalized groups, more often than dominant groups, ex-
perience a tension or mismatch between their lived experiences and the
resources available to talk about them [18]. Further, their efforts to
conceptualize them in a way that can be “heard” in the dominant cul-
ture are likely to be met with microaggressive challenges to the cate-
gories or experiences of the marginalized group [19]. Fricker [13] gives
the example of the difficulty that women had speaking of the coercive
nature of sexual advances by supervisors in the workplace as recently as
the 1970s. In this as in other cases where frameworks for making ex-
perience comprehensible to oneself and others are inadequate, a new
category (“sexual harassment”) had to be created before the phenom-
enon could be taken seriously in the dominant culture.
Because of the structural authority afforded to science and scientists
in environmental politics, it is useful to think of “layperson” or “non-
scientist” as a marginalized identity category in the context of epistemic
injustice. Fricker [13] has little to say about the categories of “expert”
and “lay” and in fact cites specialized knowledge as a permissible
reason for valuing one person’s testimony over another’s. However,
research in social studies of science has shown that distinctions made
between laypeople and experts hinge on far more than whose knowl-
edge is most accurate [20–22]. Women and people of color face sig-
nificant challenges in establishing identities as “scientist” or “engineer”
(e.g. [23,24]), and social class may also play a significant role in whose
testimony is valued in scientific practice [25]. Working class whites
may thus also be seen as potential victims of epistemic injustice, to the
extent that their status as “laypeople” results in their not being taken
seriously as knowers.
Theories of environmental justice have recognized that the concept,
as articulated by EJ activists, has multiple facets. Schlosberg [26]
identifies four: distributive justice, procedural justice, recognition, and
capabilities. However, case studies, especially of frontline communities’
engagements with science, show that EJ activists also attack epistemic
injustices, which are rife in environmental justice conflicts. Testimonial
injustices are most overt. Cole and Foster [27], for example, describe
Kettleman City, California, activists’ accounts of odors and illnesses
related to pollution from a toxic waste dump being dismissed because
they were Latino and, in many cases, not native English speakers. Si-
milarly, former Love Canal, New York, resident and founder of the US-
based Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, Lois Gibbs, de-
scribes how a public official refused to take her seriously when she
alleged that her children were sickened by toxic waste buried under a
playground. He branded her a “hysterical housewife”—an explicitly
gendered denigration of her testimony [28]. Frontline community
members’ testimony is also frequently dismissed on the grounds that
their comments are scientifically inaccurate or irrelevant [29,30], a
move that pre-emptively denies the possibility that laypeople’s local
knowledge or ways of knowing can contribute to collective under-
standing.
Hermeneutic injustices also pervade environmental justice con-
troversies. Perhaps the most striking example are the resources for
making meaning of community exposures to chemicals. Quantitative
risk assessment, a technique that uses toxicological data to produce
probabilistic measures of increased risk of disease as a result of ex-
posure, dominates regulatory responses to hazards in frontline com-
munities. Environmental justice activists and social scientists writing
about the movement have critiqued the framework, on two broad
G. Ottinger
grounds. Risk assessments often rely on assumptions about environ-
mental exposures that only hold for white, middle-class lifestyles, ne-
glecting, for example, exposure to mercury as a result of subsistence
fishing in immigrant communities or ceremonial uses of waterways by
Native American tribes [31,16], and thus resulting in consequential
inaccuracies. In addition, EJ scholars and activists find risk assessment’s
underlying worldview to be problematic, in that it reduces health harms
to probabilistic measures of disease incidence, presumes that risks can
be known and controlled, and institutionalizes “acceptable” levels of
risk in place of taking a precautionary approach [32]. Risk assessment
thus tends to exclude communities’ understandings and experiences of
hazards and harms, and silence alternative ways of conceiving of health
and quality of life [33,34].
As a resource for meaning-making, risk assessment does at times
work to the advantage of frontline communities by enabling regulators
to assemble complicated, heterogeneous data into a persuasive argu-
ment that environmental remediation is necessary to protect commu-
nity health (e.g. [16]). The hermeneutic injustice lies in the fact that
risk assessment, with all of its biases and partiality, so dominates efforts
to understand the relationship between pollution and health. Commu-
nities challenging risk assessments have been successful, to a large
extent, in getting experts to reconsider their assumptions and in-
corporate communities’ local knowledge—e.g. of fish consumption
rates—into the existing frameworks, resulting in more accurate risk
assessments [16]. However, attempts to create alternative conceptions
of environmental hazards and their effects on communities, such as
shifting to a “health and well-being” paradigm, have met significant
institutional resistance [34]. Further, many communities continue to
struggle to articulate alternative ways of understanding the harms of
pollution [58], and may find themselves falling back on expert-derived
frameworks that fail to fully express their concerns [35]. The resources
available for persuasively interpreting data are thus not attuned to the
perspectives and experience of frontline communities; I argue that this
mismatch constitutes a hermeneutic injustice.
Citizen science can be seen as a response to epistemic injustice in
frontline communities. Community-driven data-collection efforts in
particular, which have included air monitoring with homemade
“buckets” [7,12], water monitoring in areas affected by natural gas
drilling [5], and health surveys designed and conducted by community
members [10], confront testimonial injustice by giving marginalized
speakers quantitative information to bolster their credibility when
talking to experts who might otherwise be quick to dismiss what they
have to say on the basis of who they are. While data alone is no
guarantee that regulators will accept community members’ accounts,
community-generated data does appear to make U.S. government
agencies more likely to collect additional data or take enforcement
action [10,36].
One striking example was recounted by former Global Community
Monitor (GCM) organizer Ruth Breech at the Community-based Science
for Action (CBSfA) conference in New Orleans in 2014. Some years
before, Breech had worked with a group of women in Cincinnati, Ohio.
They claimed that a plastics plant, located in close proximity to an
elementary school, was releasing dangerous levels of toxic chemicals.
Company officials and regulators at first labeled them “crazy grand-
mothers” and “crazy mothers,” according to Breech, and refused to act.
Then the women took air samples and found high levels of chemicals
manufactured by the plant that they had been complaining about. After
seeing their results, regulators agreed to conduct additional monitoring
and, ultimately, helped see to it that the elementary school was re-
located (author’s fieldnotes, 15 November 2014).
Whereas citizen science meets testimonial injustices head-on, its
relationship to hermeneutic injustice is more complicated. The very
nature of the data collected by frontline communities may represent a
challenge to experts’ frameworks for conceptualizing environmental
hazards. For example, activists from frontline communities routinely
compare results from short-term air samples to screening levels for
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much longer term exposures. This practice has long been criticized by
regulators and industry scientists for being an “apples to oranges”
comparison. However, I argue [12] that activists’ approach should in-
stead be seen as a strategic refusal of experts’ distinctions between
chronic and acute exposure, to call attention to harms suffered by re-
sidents as a result of semi-regular, sub-acute releases that fit neither
category. In this one intervention, we can clearly see activists trying to
use citizen science data to address hermeneutic injustices. At the same
time, the fact that activists continue to (mis)use experts’ screening le-
vels to contextualize their air monitoring data points to the larger in-
terpretive challenges they face. Experts’ frameworks tend not to do
justice to their experience, but few other resources for interpreting
quantitative data exist, making it difficult for frontline communities to
communicate their data in a way that is meaningful in the public dis-
course.
3. Storytelling in environmental advocacy
Quantitative data, including that generated by community members
themselves, thus often fall into a kind of hermeneutic gap for frontline
communities. The frameworks for making sense of the data offered by
scientists tend to be inadequate to community members’ experiences,
but communities often find it challenging to invent new categories and
languages to make data meaningful, especially ones that are recogniz-
able to experts. Social science research on narrative practices in both
environmental policy and the environmental justice movement suggest
that storytelling may be one way that environmental justice activists
can fill the hermeneutic gap around data.
Storytelling has been shown to be an important tool for meaning-
making across a wide range of issues [37–39], including environmental
policy [9,14] and environmental justice [40,41]. The practice of telling
stories involves selecting characters, describing a setting, commu-
nicating causal relationships between events, and choosing starting and
ending points [42]. Through their choices, storytellers implicitly create
a moral landscape, distinguishing heroes and villains, good actions and
bad ones, desirable and undesirable futures [43]. Stories thus assign
responsibility in particular ways, enabling some actors to be called to
account and others to escape sanction [39,44]. They also justify past
actions [38] and make the case for next steps [9,42], in part by warning
of the consequences if appropriate actions are not taken [14].
In environmental justice realm, storytelling has been an especially
important tool for meaning-making. One goal of EJ activism has been to
enhance the ability of marginalized communities, including frontline
communities, to speak for themselves [45]. In that context, storytelling
is not only a powerful way for community members’ voices to be heard
[27] but also a mechanism for weaving together individuals’ hetero-
geneous experiences into collective knowledge about a place, its his-
tory, and the threats posed to it by pollution or industrial development
[40]. Further, to a much greater extent than in policy realms, where
elites control the stories, EJ storytelling gives community groups a way
to refuse dominant narratives about them, and advance their own, al-
ternative understandings of their communities, how they’ve been
treated, what is owed to them by regulators and other dominant groups,
and what their future should look like [40,41].
Although the goals of citizen science in frontline communities are
similar—to give voice to local knowledge and offer alternatives to ex-
perts’ claims about environmental quality—the literature on the EJ
movement has thus far not theorized the potential relationship between
storytelling and engagements with quantitative data, in keeping with
larger cultural assumptions that stories and science belong to different
realms [43]. Most studies of frontline communities’ citizen science
projects have examined them as interventions in technoscientific
practice, comparing their standards, purposes, and epistemologies to
experts’ science (e.g. [10,16,46,12]), with a few acknowledging that
there may be “plural logics” for citizen science, including education and
organizing [5,7]. Questions of how frotline communities may be
G. Ottinger
narrating their citizen science data, particularly in practices of story-
telling in EJ campaigns more generally, have received little explicit
attention.
Yet in policy settings not unlike those addressed by EJ activists,
storytelling has been shown to exist in complex relation with science.
Scientific research cannot, in itself, determine what policy actions
ought to be taken; further, on the most pressing policy issues, science is
usually incomplete, uncertain, an/or contested [47]. Stories can help to
envision policy directions in the absence of conclusive information or to
assemble existing data into a case for particular policies [9,48–50].
Stories are powerful, in that similar data can be used to make con-
flicting cases, depending on, for example, where the story starts and
ends [9]. They can also open up the policy-making process, by engaging
diverse participants in playful exercises that tell stories about energy
transformations [51]. At the same time, stories are constraining: they
are most compelling when they do not depart too greatly from existing
narratives [43], and policy realms may be defined by a small handful of
stories into which data must be fit in order to be recognized [9]; see also
[14]. As I will show below, similar patterns are evident in frontline
communities’ practices of citizen science. Like policy experts, activists
narrate their data and, at the same time, are constrained in the stories
they can tell by pre-existing narratives. Examining the intertwining of
data and stories in the EJ context helps us to better understand both the
function that stories serve as a resource for meaning-making, as well as
the limitations of storytelling in addressing the hermeneutic injustices
suffered by frontline communities.
4. Community-driven air monitoring in frontline communities
One arena in which to examine the relationship between data and
story-telling in frontline communities—and, specifically, to understand
whether and how stories can become a hermeneutic resource for
communities trying to make sense of data—is community-based acti-
vism around ambient air toxics monitoring. Communities in close
proximity to fossil fuel facilities, especially oil refineries and natural gas
fracking sites, are routinely exposed to toxic air pollutants with known
health effects, including carcinogens benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene,
and xylene (BTEX), respiratory irritants like sulfur dioxide, and neu-
rotoxins like hydrogen sulfide and carbon disulfide. Historically, in-
formation about the ambient levels of these and other toxins in re-
sidential communities has been scarce. Regulatory monitoring in the
United States focuses on just six “criteria pollutants,” of which only
sulfur dioxide is released in significant quantity by petrochemical
plants, and monitoring stations are set up in areas considered re-
presentative of the airshed, not heavily industrialized areas where
emissions are high. Further, standard procedures for monitoring air
toxins involve sampling over a 24-h period which, residents of frontline
communities argue, is too long to capture the peak periods of pollution
that particularly concern them [12].
Beginning in the mid-1990s, a network of community activists and
allied non-profit organizations with a special interest in air monitoring
emerged. The network’s emergence was catalyzed by a 16-day release
of a neurotoxin called catacarb from the Unocal oil refinery in Rodeo,
California in 1994, which sickened residents in the downwind town of
Crockett. Community outrage at the unreported (by Unocal) and un-
detected (by regulators) release resulted in two innovations in mon-
itoring for toxic gases. The first was the development of the “bucket” air
sampler, an inexpensive, community-friendly “grab sampling” device,
with which community members collect air samples in non-reactive
plastic bags and send them to a laboratory for analysis. Buckets enabled
community groups to generate data about ambient air levels of toxic
chemicals—without waiting for regulators to arrive with their mon-
itoring equipment.
First used in Crockett, Rodeo, and communities near the four other
San Francisco Bay area refineries, buckets have since been adopted by
communities near petrochemical facilities across the United States and
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around the world [36], in no small part due to the dissemination efforts
of two northern California-based non-profits: Communities for a Better
Environment (CBE) and Global Community Monitor (GCM). The
buckets spread along with an organizing model (the “bucket brigade”)
and guidelines for using the devices: the several-minute samples are
taken when chemical odors in the community reach an intensity that
residents judge to be a 7 on a 10-point scale. Over time, these organi-
zations, along with others in the network, began to experiment with
other community-friendly sampling methods and devices, including
MiniVol™ monitors for measuring ambient air levels of particulate
matter and “wipe sampling,” a technique to collect soot deposited on
windowsills or other surfaces so that it can be analyzed by a laboratory
for heavy metals and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
The second technological development to come out of the 1994
Unocal release was the creation of a continuous, real-time fenceline
monitoring system that was installed at Unocal’s borders with Rodeo
(the South Fenceline) and Crockett (the North Fenceline) in 1996. Each
Fenceline system monitors some two dozen chemicals using several
different monitoring devices, including “open-path” monitors that send
a laser beam down the length of the refinery’s fenceline to detect any
chemicals that may be crossing into the community. Crockett and
Rodeo residents, working with engineers from CBE, were instrumental
in selecting and testing the monitoring equipment, and have remained
involved in overseeing the system ever since [8]. For other air mon-
itoring activists, the Crockett-Rodeo Fenceline has since served as an
exemplar of the kind of monitoring that could and, they argue, should
be happening at all refineries.
Although bucket monitoring is frequently accompanied by calls for
continuous, real-time monitoring, very few communities have been
successful in persuading refineries or regulatory agencies to install si-
milar systems. Fenceline air monitoring remains concentrated in the
Bay area, where the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, has a
system similar the Crockett-Rodeo Fenceline, installed in 2013. In ad-
dition, the regional air regulator, the Bay Area Air Quality Management
District (BAAQMD), in 2016 passed a rule requiring similar systems to
be installed at all 5 of the area’s refineries. The existing systems are
required by the terms of their local land use permits, paid for by the
refineries, and operated by an independent contracting company. Data
are made publicly available in real time through a website (www.
fenceline.org).
5. An ethnographic approach to data and storytelling
In the past 20 years, then, the air quality data available to com-
munities in close proximity to petrochemical facilities has grown dra-
matically, and is only continuing to grow. But how do they make sense
of the data, and what role does storytelling play? The answers I offer in
this paper derive from ethnographic engagement with air monitoring
activists since 2001. My research has included an extended period of
ethnographic fieldwork in New Sarpy and Norco, Louisiana, where
buckets were being used as part of community campaigns (2002–2003);
and two rounds of semi-structured interviews with individuals involved
in community-based air monitoring efforts, one focused on the use of
real-time technology in Chalmette, Louisiana (2007) and the other on
the history of the Crockett-Rodeo Fenceline and the development of the
bucket (2014–2016). I have also done archival research on the origins
of buckets and the Fenceline, and I have observed a variety of events
significant for air monitoring advocates, including the Community-
Based Science for Action Conference in New Orleans in November
2014, cosponsored by GCM and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade; GCM and
US EPA Region 9’s “Workshop to Strengthen Community-Based Air
Monitoring Protocols” in July 2015; and several BAAQMD public
hearings on proposed refinery air monitoring rules in 2014 and 2015.
In addition to these traditional research activities, I have actively
participated in non-profit groups’ efforts to give meaning to air mon-
itoring results. As a “science intern” at the Northern California EJ non-
G. Ottinger
profit Communities for a Better Environment in 2001 and 2002, I
compiled health-based standards and screening levels to which bucket
results could be compared. As a volunteer at the Louisiana Bucket
Brigade in 2002 and 2003, I helped develop protocols for taking wipe
samples and tried to assemble comparable “levels of concern” for wipe
sampling results. As a member of GCM’s advisory board from 2014 to
2016, I participated in the organization’s process of developing a new
quality assurance plan. Finally, I am the Principal Investigator on a
National Science Foundation grant to work with Bay area communities
to design a web-based interface that renders data from fenceline
monitors more accessible, interactive, and usable.
Through these various activities, I have observed instances of
community members and EJ activists telling retrospective stories that
give meaning to air monitoring data, watched as they made sense of
new data in the context of on-going campaigns, and struggled with
them to interpret data in ways that are both sensible and significant. My
cases have been based primarily in the San Francisco Bay area,
California, and the New Orleans, Louisiana, area; however, the stories I
have heard from other areas, combined with the Bay area’s status as a
hub of activity on air monitoring issues, suggest that the practices I
have observed are reasonably representative of practices in other U.S.
communities. Because of the participatory, ethnographic nature of my
research, incidents reported here are reconstructed from my field notes.
Speech is paraphrased except where otherwise noted.
6. Air quality stories
This paper asks to what extent the stories of frontline communities
can be a resource for interpreting air quality data—which in turn re-
quires asking what stories are being told by community members about
the experience of living on the borders of an oil refinery or petro-
chemical plant. Across the communities with which I have interacted,
several kinds of stories are told and retold: stories of harms to health,
stories of systemic danger, stories of dissembling, and stories of dis-
respect.
In stories of harms to health, community members tell how they
have been sickened by exposures to pollution. Usually the protago-
nist—possibly the narrator, but just as likely a family member—starts
out in relatively good health. But after breathing refinery emissions,
they begin to experience health effects, or are diagnosed with cancer or
some other disease. Sometimes these stories include a major chemical
release from the facility that results in a severe worsening of symptoms.
In another kind of harms-to-health story, a protagonist who suffers from
chronic ill health—usually respiratory symptoms—goes away from the
community for a period and finds that her symptoms vanish, only to
come back when she returns home.
Stories of systemic danger dovetail with stories of harms to health,
but they focus on the disruption caused by releases and accidents. In
these stories, an otherwise unremarkable moment is shattered by the
sound of an explosion, an overpowering smell, or the ground shaking.
The event plunges the protagonist into a state of panic and con-
fusion—what’s going on? Should they shelter in place? Should they
evacuate?—that may also include acute physical symptoms like burning
eyes or shortness of breath. These stories continue past the moment of
crisis, to situate the accident as one of many, and/or to describe how
the fear it produced has changed the protagonist’s life. One example of
a story of systemic danger comes from Steve Lerner’s [52] book, Dia-
mond, which devotes an entire chapter (“Dangerous Neighbor”) to a
chronology of the many accidents at a Shell chemical plant and refinery
that shaped life in Norco, Louisiana’s, African-American community. Of
a 1988 explosion that killed 7 workers, Lerner writes, “Many residents
have not slept well since the explosion. 'We slept in our clothes for a
long time,' said Jenny Taylor. ‘Tell you the truth, I still have my clothes
laid out on a chair so I can jump into them….We don't know what they
[the plants] are going to do, so you can't ever really be relaxed.'" (34)
Harms-to-health stories and systemic-danger stories are similar in
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that the villain is not personified: the threat is, respectively, the pol-
lution from the plant, or the accident-prone plant itself. The other two
kinds of stories, stories of dissembling and stories of disrespect, feature
human antagonists. In both kinds of story, the antagonists may be in-
dustry representatives, including the engineers who run the plants and
the spokespeople and managers who attempt to defend it against cri-
ticism and manufacture community support; they may be the en-
vironmental regulators ostensibly charged with ensuring that the plants
are not operating to the detriment of their neighbors; or community
stories may include antagonists from both industry personnel and reg-
ulatory agencies.
In stories of dissembling, residents who wish to know how they are
being affected by petrochemical pollution are thwarted by plant per-
sonnel and/or regulators, who are portrayed as hiding or withholding
relevant information. In one common version of this story, community
members call the regulatory agency when they notice something awry
at the neighboring facility—a particularly bad smell, for example—but
the regulatory agency waits to investigate until the situation has passed.
In another, a facility subject to surveillance (e.g. fenceline monitoring)
takes steps to make sure its emissions evade detection. These stories tell
of facilities flaring at night or on weekends, when inspectors aren’t
looking, or of plant personnel disabling monitors when they know
they’re going to have a release.
In stories of disrespect, a concerned community member confronts
an industry or environmental agency official about the impact of pol-
lution on his community. The official dismisses his concern, insists that
his observations are somehow wrong, questions his motives, or other-
wise refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the community members’
intervention. Many stories of disrespect go on to describe some addi-
tional evidence that the official’s position could not possibly be true;
here they overlap with stories of dissembling.
None of these kinds of stories are dependent on quantitative data.
They derive from community members’ observations and experiences.
At the same time, however, they can be bolstered by data. One 2001
Louisiana Bucket Brigade publication tells the story of systemic danger
with a table showing the number of pounds of sulfur dioxide released
each month in accidents at the Orion refinery, showing that the facility
averaged more than two accidents and 32,000 pounds of SO2 per week.
Conversely, these stories can provide a context for making sense of
quantitative data that is otherwise difficult to interpret, as the next
section will show.
7. The sense-making power of stories
Even the most extensive air monitoring undertaken, or advocated
for, by the frontline communities described here does not lend itself to
‘proving’ in any scientifically defensible way that residents’ health is
being harmed by facility emissions. Environmental and health agencies
(both in the U.S. and internationally) have published reference con-
centrations and screening levels for the chemicals that are being mea-
sured. However, comparing those to measured values is less than
straightforward. The process of setting those levels involves a good deal
of uncertainty [53]. As a result, the levels set by different agencies can
differ dramatically, leaving open the question of which value mon-
itoring results should be compared to. In addition, screening levels,
reference concentrations, and regulatory standards (where they exist at
all) are largely incommensurate with the data collected by or available
to communities. Where the former speak to averages over periods
ranging from an hour to a year, results from bucket samples represent
averages over only a few minutes, and measurements from continuous
monitors like the Crockett-Rodeo Fenceline are reported as in-
stantaneous measurements, without relevant averages being calculated
(or data being made available for download to enable community
groups to calculate them).
Viewed as a potential resource for making sense of air quality data
collected by fenceline communities, then, scientific and administrative
G. Ottinger
frameworks are quite limited. In particular, they do not easily facilitate
the incorporation of data into the harms-to-health story, where data
would seem most relevant. Both other stories, especially stories of
dissembling and stories of disrespect, can give data meaning in-
dependent of its ability to prove that community health is being harmed
by pollution.
For example, in June 2001, a lightning strike set fire to a gasoline
storage tank at the Valero refinery in New Sarpy, Louisiana. Although
photos of the event show a large plume of black smoke emanating from
the tank, refinery officials attempted to reassure the neighboring
community that, in the 13 h that the fire burned, they were not exposed
to any dangerous chemicals because the wind blew emissions from the
fire away from the community. This claim was met with incredulity by
residents who had seen and smelled the smoke, and in the days fol-
lowing the fire, refinery officials’ statement was offered as one more
episode in an on-going story of dissembling, just as the fire itself was
one more episode in residents’ story of systemic danger.
At the time of the fire, however, a bucket air sample had been taken
and sent away for laboratory analysis. When the sample results arrived
(a process that at the time took a couple of weeks), the story of dis-
sembling gave them immediate significance. Sample analysis showed
several toxic chemicals, including carbon disulfide and carbonyl sulfide,
present in the air at high levels. Refinery officials’ statements that the
fire had no impact on the community were already being painted as
absurd. These data—showing that refinery-related chemicals had been
in the air at high levels at the time of the fire—bolstered the story that
refinery officials had been making a clumsy attempt to hide the true
impact of their accident. The high chemical levels also became part of
the story of systemic danger, suggesting what residents had to fear from
the many accidents at the refinery.
Importantly, the story of systemic danger and, especially, the story
of dissembling gave residents’ data meaning independent of scientific
frameworks for interpreting air monitoring data. The simple presence of
measurable levels of carbon disulfide and carbonyl sulfide showed that
refinery officials had been less than truthful when they claimed their
massive fire had no impact on the community. The demonstrated im-
pacts, in turn, added gravity to the story that accidents at the refinery
put residents in danger. Although the levels of chemicals measured
during the fire were compared to health-based screening levels, attacks
on their commensurability with the screening levels or questions about
significance for health in the longer term could not detract from their
meaning in the context of stories of systemic danger and dissembling.
The inadequacies of scientific frameworks for interpreting data in ways
that represent residents’ experience—the hermeneutic injustice de-
scribed above—were thus countered by using stories to make sense of
air sampling data.
Another instance of data taking on meaning in the context of
community stories occurred in New Sarpy, Louisiana, in the summer of
2002. Throughout the summer, at events associated with Concerned
Citizens of New Sarpy’s campaign for relocation, resident Harlon
Rushing was telling his own story of disrespect. He had noticed black
soot on his truck and the bushes around his home, three streets over
from the Orion refinery. He washed the truck and put up an open-sided
tent as a shelter for it, but within days soot once again coated his truck
and his new canvas carport. Convinced that the soot had been emitted
from the refinery, he called Orion to complain. The company sent an
inspector out, but the inspector informed Rushing that the black,
slightly sticky substance dotting his property was just dirt. Rushing
found the inspector’s response insulting, because—in his telling—it
expected him to buy into an explanation that defied common sense: the
substance was on the tops of the leaves, not the undersides, he pointed
out, and “dirt don’t just jump up on stuff.”
Rushing’s irritation with the soot provided an occasion to try out
“wipe sampling” for deposited particulates. As an intern at
Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) in California, I had re-
searched the procedure; as a volunteer for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade
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Energy Research & Social Science xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
(LABB), an EJ non-profit supporting New Sarpy residents in their
campaign, I helped Rushing take samples of the deposits on the truck
and vegetation and send them to a laboratory for analysis. The results
showed measurable levels of a number of heavy metals that are emitted
by refineries. But in looking for scientific frameworks that could help us
interpret the results, I quickly learned that, without much more so-
phisticated analysis, there was no way to know whether the chemicals
we measured posed a threat to residents’ health. Although we had
measurements, we couldn’t say what they meant. Or so I thought.
For Rushing the meaning of the results was immediately clear: be-
cause it contained heavy metals that the refinery was releasing, that
substance was clearly no ordinary dirt. It had come from the refinery,
just as he’d been saying, and the refinery inspector had been wrong, not
to mention condescending, in trying to convince him otherwise. When
Rushing subsequently told his story—which he did with even greater
vehemence—he included the wipe sampling results, enhancing his
portrayal of the inspector as disrespectful, and possibly even deceitful.
Again, this portrayal depended only on the fact that heavy metals,
linked to refinery operations, had been measured in the sample.
Whether the levels measured exceeded thresholds for health effects was
not important to the story of disrespect.
In making meaning of their data, community groups did not always
have to find alternatives to harms-to-health stories. In at least one case,
stories of harms to health did become a resource for reinterpreting air
monitoring data—and shifting experts’ frameworks in the process. In
June 2012, the former Unocal refinery, now owned by Phillips 66, in
Rodeo, California, had an accidental release from a sour water tank. A
foul smell pervaded the area, and the Crockett-Rodeo fenceline mon-
itoring system measured high levels of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), around
12 parts per million (ppm). However, the release did not trigger any
sirens or a “shelter in place” advisory from the refinery or the county
government, because measured levels of H2S remained below the
trigger point for the Community Warning System (CWS), which was set
at 15 ppm.
According to Crockett resident and Crockett-Rodeo Fenceline
oversight committee member Frank Brosnan, stories of harms to health
were prominent at a subsequent community meeting about the release.
Residents described being sickened by exposure to the high levels of
H2S, and many even went to the emergency room. In keeping with
stories of systemic danger, they also questioned the adequacy of the
CWS, which had not warned them of the hazard. Brosnan and others
began asking how the CWS level had been set, concluded that the bases
for it were not especially robust (see [53]), and successfully argued for
it to be changed from 15 ppm to 10 ppm, given the clear evidence of
health impacts at 12 ppm.
In this case, then, harms-to-health stories gave air monitoring data
an alternate meaning. The official framework for interpreting the data
said, in effect, that 12 ppm was nothing to worry about. But residents’
stories of how their health had been harmed as a result of the release
cast the 12 ppm in a new light: it became a worrisome level, and one on
which action needed to be taken. Importantly, residents’ ability to
change official interpretive frameworks by mobilizing monitoring da-
ta—something that activists have not been able to do with bucket
sampling—was enabled in no small part by a basic commensurability:
stories of acute health effects were combined with short-term data to
influence short-term or acute levels of concern. Mobilizing fenceline
data to make arguments about longer-term or systemic issues has
proven more difficult, as the next section suggests, highlighting the
limitations of story-telling as a strategy for meaning-making.
8. Narrative mismatches
In keeping with research showing storytelling to be a vehicle for
meaning making by EJ communities (e.g. [41]), the examples above
show how the stories of communities on the front lines of energy and
petrochemical facilities serve as powerful resources for making sense of
G. Ottinger
citizen science data that would be difficult to interpret—or likely to be
misinterpreted—using scientific frameworks alone. They arguably help
overcome epistemic injustices by addressing the tensions between
dominant hermeneutic resources—namely concepts and frameworks
used by scientists to make sense of chemical exposures—and the lived
experiences of frontline communities. Yet stories also have limitations
as resources for making sense of complex data. As the examples below
demonstrate, data do not always fit easily with stories of harms to
health, systemic danger, dissembling, and disrespect. These situations
of narrative mismatch require further invention of hermeneutic re-
sources, which frontline communities may or may not have the capacity
to do. They thus highlight the continuing problem of epistemic injustice
and the need for expert help in inventing modes of making data
meaningful that are faithful to residents’ experience.
In New Sarpy, Louisiana, in the summer of 2002, residents and their
allies were trying to put data behind their story that emissions from the
adjacent Orion refinery harmed their health. An occupational medicine
specialist (who had previous experience working with frontline com-
munities) and a Master’s of Public Health student (who did not), led
New Sarpy residents in designing and conducting a community health
survey that was both scientifically robust and highly attuned to local
conditions. The survey asked members of randomly selected households
whether they experienced a list of symptoms (e.g. coughing, wheezing)
or had been diagnosed with illnesses (e.g. asthma, cancer) that were
known to be associated with exposures to chemicals that had been
detected in the community and that were also queried in the U.S.
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). By using
NHANES questions, the study design team ensured that data about the
rates of symptoms in New Sarpy could be compared to a nation-wide
benchmark—solving, survey designers imagined, the interpretive pro-
blem in advance. To avoid making the study methodology overly
complex, survey respondents were asked only about illnesses (mor-
bidity) and not deaths (mortality) of family members or neighbors.
Data from the survey showed to a high degree of statistical sig-
nificance that New Sarpy residents experienced elevated rates of
asthma, chronic bronchitis, and number of respiratory symptoms. There
was additional evidence of elevated cancer rates, but these findings
were not statistically significant. Despite the clear evidence provided by
the survey that residents of the refinery-adjacent community suffered
more illness than other Americans, the study results were not in-
corporated into community members’ stories or used in their campaign.
In fact, a number of residents told me that the study “didn’t show
anything.”
To no small extent, residents’ dismissal of what was arguably a
powerful study stemmed from a narrative mismatch. The harms-to-
health story that New Sarpy residents had been telling had a specific
flavor: it was almost exclusively about the many New Sarpy residents
who had died of cancer, including a number of individuals whose
properties had been adjacent to one another. Their narrative focus on
cancer took up a larger story about the petrochemical industry in the
region, which environmental activists have dubbed “Cancer Alley.”
Indeed, one man whose wife was among those who had died of cancer
regularly concluded his harms-to-health story by saying that they called
the area “Cancer Alley” for a reason. In the context of New Sarpy re-
sidents’ particular story, study results showing elevated rates of re-
spiratory problems but not of cancer incidence or cancer death had
little meaning.
The narrative mismatch between the health study’s story of a
community gasping for breath and residents’ story of neighbors and
loved ones dropping dead of cancer could be seen as a disconnect be-
tween the hermeneutic resources offered by science and the lived ex-
perience of the community. The decision not to pursue questions about
cancer deaths was made on the basis of scientific models for under-
standing morbidity and mortality—models which look at the two se-
parately, divide illnesses and death into narrow disease categories, and
demand high levels of statistical significance. The public health
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Energy Research & Social Science xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
professionals leading the study design understood that, were they to ask
about cancer deaths, they would have to distinguish brain cancer from
lung cancer from lymphoma, and that the survey would have to find a
large number of deaths in any one of those categories to constitute a
statistically significant finding for the fewer than 100 households sur-
veyed. These methodological constraints might be seen as a kind of
hermeneutic injustice: the available resources—epidemiological ap-
proaches to understanding environmental health—make it difficult to
understand deaths in a small community as potentially connected and
to relate them to environmental conditions and current illnesses among
living community members (c.f. [54]).
The case of the New Sarpy health study could also be seen as a
problem stemming from the constraints imposed by existing narratives.
The story of the study results was not a difficult one to tell: refinery
releases were noticeable; samples had been taken to show that people
were being exposed to the chemicals released; the survey showed that
they were sick with respiratory ailments caused by those same chemi-
cals. Yet incorporating it into residents’ campaign would have required
New Sarpy residents to shift the focus of their harms-to-health story
from cancer deaths to respiratory illness. The example thus points to
another kind of hermeneutic invention that may be required to make
sense of citizen science: the creation of stories that can fit new and old
information together. To be fair, had the community not settled with
Orion so soon after the study results were released, it seems possible
that residents may have slowly updated their stories to take account of
the new results.1
The fenceline air monitoring systems in Crockett-Rodeo and
Richmond, California, highlight another form of narrative mismatch.
The monitoring systems and the online interfaces that display mon-
itoring data to the public are oriented to accidental releases of high
levels of chemicals and the acute health harms that they might cause:
they report current measured levels of chemicals and allow users to
view the past 24 h of measurements. Community members experiencing
acute harms to health can thus make connections to potential air
quality issues in real time, as did Crockett and Rodeo residents during
the H2S release described above. The data generated by the monitoring
systems could also potentially speak to long-term health and environ-
mental issues, but the web interfaces do not support exploration,
queries, or calculations that would help residents build a picture of air
quality over months or years.
Hypothesizing that a different sort of interface would enable com-
munity members to make more meaning of the data, especially in the
context of concerns about long-term and systemic issues, in 2016 I in-
itiated a participatory design process—in collaboration with engineers
from the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University and community
activists from Crockett, Rodeo, Richmond, and Benicia, California—to
create a new website to make data more accessible and interpretable to
residents of Bay area refinery communities. Through that process, it
quickly became evident that the inaccessibility of data online was a
relatively superficial obstacle to sense-making. Once it was possible to
plot and explore months’ worth of data, we ran into the same inter-
pretive problems that other community-based monitoring efforts have.
Health-based screening levels that distinguish safe from unsafe levels
are uncertain and highly variable. Regulatory limits, where they exist at
all, share with screening levels the problem of being expressed in terms
of time frames that do not map well onto community members’ ev-
eryday experience of living with petrochemical pollution. And detec-
tion limits for the monitors themselves were in many cases too high to
1
Houston’s [40] (1) account of storytelling as a vehicle for accommodating and
weaving together multiple perspectives points to this as a strong possibility; on the other
hand, Polletta et al. [43] (1) suggest the difficulty of advancing new stories that depart
from existing narratives, although in this case it is not the narrative arc (refineries emit
chemicals that make people sick) but the details of its substance that would have changed.
Studies of both storytelling and EJ-oriented citizen science would benefit from research
on how and whether new data can shift existing narratives.
G. Ottinger
register ambient air levels of chemicals until they were far above
standards and screening levels.
Looking to community stories as resources for sense-making only
led us to more mismatches. Stories of dissembling were especially
prominent. Community members involved in our participatory design
process often claim, for example, that air quality is worse at night and
on the weekends (when no one is watching) and that the monitors are
taken down when there are releases. Yet with readings of two dozen
chemicals and meteorological data every five minutes at each of several
monitoring stations, it has proven difficult to create algorithms that
could show these kinds of trends—if indeed they do exist. Stories of
systemic danger led us to look in the data for “incidents,” or moments of
especially high chemical concentrations, but we struggled to define
what an incident looked like. How high? For how long? For which
chemical or chemical(s)? Having had limited success with these ap-
proaches, we have begun to experiment with the collection of other
kinds of data to give meaning to measurements of chemical con-
centrations, hoping that real-time health data from commercial fitness
trackers and residents' reports of odors or symptoms can help bridge the
gap between extant stories and available data.
The struggle to find broader meaning in real-time air quality data
underscores the limitations of stories as a hermeneutic resource for
frontline communities. The data can be quite helpful when they line up
with the stories being told, as when the immediacy of fenceline mon-
itoring data match the immediacy of the kind of harms-to-health stories
that arise in the context of an accident, or when data effectively catches
refinery officials in a lie. But stories of long-term or systemic harm are
not easily told with instantaneous data, and instantaneous data are hard
to make sense of when the stories emphasize systemic harm.
9. Conclusion: building hermeneutic resources
Communities on the front lines of oil refineries and petrochemical
plants in the United States regularly experience epistemic justices: their
testimony is not given due credibility; resources for shared-sense
making favor dominant, especially experts’, ways of looking at the
world. Collecting and engaging with ambient air monitoring data has
been one way that communities adjacent to refineries have attempted
to address testimonial injustices, by giving their testimony quantitative
backing, but their efforts have made hermeneutic injustices all the more
visible. Scientific frameworks for making sense of the data are not
adequate to the communities’ experiences.
Building on research that shows storytelling to be a key way of
making meaning in environmental justice and environmental policy
settings, I have argued that frontline communities’ stories of harms to
health, systemic danger, dissembling, and disrespect can often serve as
resources for making (alternative) sense of air monitoring data, but that
their effectiveness is limited in situations where the stories are not well
matched to the available data. For citizen scientists in frontline com-
munities—certainly in the U.S. but possibly also in other countries were
fossil fuels are extracted, transported, and processed—stories are im-
portant but not adequate means of addressing hermeneutic injustices.
The problem of narrative mismatch is not unique to situations of
environmental or epistemic injustice [9], and further research to un-
derstand patterns in where narrative mismatch does and does not occur
would be valuable. But noting the occurrence and consequences of
mismatch points to the continuing need, across spheres of energy and
environmental policy, for hermeneutic invention, or the creation of new
concepts and frameworks that help to make visible understandings and
experiences of marginalized groups. Especially as the data sets available
to policy makers and frontline communities grow, those pushing for
greater environmental justice will need to find ways to go beyond both
current scientific frameworks and existing stories in order to enable
communities to use data to better communicate their experience and
push for meaningful change.
The processes of hermeneutic invention, such as the case of naming
8
Energy Research & Social Science xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
“sexual harassment” related by Fricker [13], have yet to be well
documented. Moreover, the era of big data seems still to call for addi-
tional experimentation in methods for making new, socially situated
meaning of complex data. What seems clear is that these processes will
need to be broadly collaborative. The situated knowledge and experi-
ence of ordinary citizens, especially residents of frontline communities,
is clearly necessary to the process of making new meaning, but so too is
the expertise of individuals with deep knowledge of relevant scientific
disciplines (e.g. chemistry, toxicology, meteorology) and individuals
accustomed to working with data. Social scientists, community orga-
nizers, and other “middle actors” [15] (see also [55]) who can speak
across the various levels and communities involved in the making of
policy, also have a role to play (c.f. [51]). Key to the success of these
collaborations, however, will be the willingness of all participants to
look beyond existing scientific frameworks and stories to create alter-
native ways of making sense that are grounded in multiple, diverse
ways of knowing. This vision of hermeneutic invention underscores the
importance of cultivating curious, humble, open-minded experts [56]
willing to engage in collaborative practices of meaning-making (see
also [16]), and suggests the need for policies aimed at furthering en-
vironmental and epistemic justice to go beyond promoting access to
data and attend to fostering processes of meaning-making as well by,
for example, providing resources for community groups to work with
NGOs, regulators, and experts from a variety of disciplinary back-
grounds on analyzing public data and, hopefully, developing modes of
interpretation adequate to the experiences of frontline communities.
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