Gwen Ottinger

My research takes place at the physical borders where oil refineries abut residential communities. My interlocutors worry about the toxic chemicals that flow across those borders, and how to measure them.  Other things flow less easily: refinery fencelines often mark a sharp divide between different ways of knowing and different ways of thinking about environmental responsibility.

Rooted in these borderlands, my scholarship moves across several other boundaries, as well:

Social science/Engineering – I found my way into STS from engineering.  Engineers weren’t asking the questions that most interested me: where they asked how to design new technology, I wanted to know whether to, and why.  I still worry that engineering as a profession isn’t attending enough to these questions, so I collaborate with engineers and social scientists trying to make them more central to engineering education and culture, including through the Network for Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace (ESJP).

Research/Practice – Empirical research in STS can help us generate hypotheses about how technology and science could be orchestrated to better support social justice and human welfare.  My research group, the Fair Tech Collective, looks for ways to test these hypotheses. For example, having noticed that fenceline air monitoring data that weren’t explorable or downloadable were also not being used by fenceline communities, we created a website where people could interact with the data and (we hoped) make their own meaning of it.  The data still aren’t being used, but we now have a much better idea why. 

Empirical/Normative – By now, STS scholars know a lot about the social processes through which technology and science entrench inequities or, alternatively, create better worlds for people.  I feel that it’s time to shape that knowledge into a strong set of recommendations for how society should treat technology and science. This kind of normative claim is not the usual realm of social scientists.  However, I wish that more of us would take steps to develop the ethical theories that follow from our research, and to provide policy makers with rationales for reshaping their approaches to technology.

Scholarship/Activism – I am not an activist, but I believe in and support the work of those calling for an end to fossil fuels and justice for those harmed by toxins. My challenge—which I believe is also a challenge for the field of STS—is to craft research projects that are in some way meaningful to activist movements that I support. Are there strategic uses for the knowledge that I create? Do the infrastructures that my projects have built actually empower? Do the things that I write reach audiences who will mobilize for systemic change? I aspire to be able to answer “yes” more often.