povesham.wordpress.com
Gwen Ottinger’s “The Science of Repair”
I very much like the work of Gwen Ottinger, who is a professor at Drexel University. Gwen is a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) researcher, and among a group of researchers in STS who are researching community-led science, such as the Bucket Brigade. Her work is particularly important in the context of environmental justice (EJ), because the sites that she’s been focusing on are refineries and petrochemical factories, and their neighbouring communities (fenceline communities).
With over 20 years of experience in researching the interactions between factories, local government, communities, and the science and scientists who are involved in these situations, the book **_The Science of Repair_** (https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197769867.001.0001) is offered as a guide for researchers who want to find their place, and do it in a moral and ethical way. I’m writing this post both as a way to capture my understanding of the book, to share reflections, and to find the points of contact with the work that I was involved in and other projects that I know.
The name of the book might be slightly confusing, which is a shame. Science of repair might be understood as the importance of maintenance, or the right to repair, or the importance of repairing things instead of replacing them. However, the book is not about these notions of repair.
The core of the argument of the book is a call for researchers who are working in cases of social and environmental justice to develop an approach to science and engagement that is aimed at repairing moral relationships within the context of the situation in which they are working. To understand this work of science of repair, I think that we need to understand the building blocks of her argument.
The set of concepts that she’s using are:
* A notion of a **moral community** – that’s a society or a community of people with shared values, ethical conduct, morality, and connections with a clear concept of what is right and wrong to do, and in particular how you should treat each other within the community.
* The **moral relationships** between different actors, groups, and individuals within this moral community. It’s the expectation that members of the community will treat each other with care. You are supposed to notice when someone was wronged according to the framework of the community.
* **Dysfunctional moral relationships** are happening when people decide that another group (or individuals) are not part of the moral community an do not deserve protection or to be considered as someone with a valid say within the moral community. Throughout the book, Gwen shows how dysfunctional moral relationships occur between groups in environmental justice cases, with the marginalised groups (who also suffer most of the harm) being excluded from the moral community, which justifies the harm in a way. _It’s the repair of these moral relationships that the book aims to address._
* A major part of a dysfunctional moral relationship is **abandonment** in which some group of people is not being treated well, and it is acceptable to treat them wrongly. In the book (and in her wider work), the examples for that are through paying more attention to the demands of the powerful companies who run the refineries, or paying more attention to the jobs and the economic benefits from industrial activities, while not recognising and dismissing health concerns of the people who live in fenceline communities.
* Within the role of researchers and community researchers, Gwen explores the concept of **knowing well**. She defines knowing well as a form of knowing that “involves broad ideas about right and wrong that we can generally agree to. You should be honest about what you observe, for example. You should choose knowing over ignorance. You should not cause harm in your pursuit of knowledge.” (p. 36).
* Knowing well doesn’t require scientific degrees and expertise, and can be developed by community members and activities. Knowing well also requires avoiding privileging **“really science”** when the data and science that is done by community members is valued only when it is done as if they were scientists. Gwen links it to “**scientific chauvinism** “: “Under scientific chauvinism, credentialed scientists are granted sole authority to establish and uphold norms for knowing. Questions of how to know well—essential to good moral relations—are reduced to assertions about what is “really science.”” (from the abstract of Ch. 2)
With these concepts in place, the rest of the book continues to develop the idea of what a science of repair would look like and how it is practiced. Gwen pays attention especially to accountability of organisations and actors in the situation, including scientists; keeping possibilities open; and promoting inquisitiveness that can allow for repairing moral relationships. In each of these cases, she uses examples from her rich experience with fenceline communities to illustrate the issues in a nuanced, careful way. In each chapter, the final pages provide guidance to researchers who want to implement science of repair in this form – how to ask questions? How to work with different actors? In the final chapter, she also expands the guidance in discussing what scientific institutions should do.
I was not familiar with the concept of moral repair from Margaret Urban Walker that Gwen Ottinger uses in her book. It was very valuable to learn about this perpective and how it can be used to understand community science and participatory research in environmental and social justice contexts.
I find it always valuable to read about the refinery cases that Gwen covers, because although I’ve done different work under the title of environmental justice, ever since I started looking at the US vs UK cases, it was clear that becuase of historical harms, scale, power of corporations in politics, and structures of environmental regulations and their enforcement, the European cases are vastly different. For example, it is noticeable that if you look at UK research into environmental justice, you’ll see that many of them rely on the availability of national datasets and therefore they are based on studies that look at the whole country (such as https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00399.x) . The discussions are much more academic and policy-oriented. More generally, as Watt (2025) pointed out “In Europe, environmental issues are often viewed through a social and political lens, leading to stronger collective action and regulations aimed at reducing emissions. …In contrast, U.S. political culture emphasizes individual rights and free-market solutions, which has historically resulted in slower progress on environmental regulations.” Because of that, there is an implicit expectation that ‘someone from the government’ will monitor the situation and, in case of a problem, will address it. Also, with the precautionary principle, people assume that the levels and standards that are set and monitored by public authorities are designed to protect their health and their environment. That’s partially the reason why the huge pollution of rivers in the UK by water companies is such a shock. If you watch Dirty Business, a series about water pollution, you’ll notice a lot of attention to the failings of the Environment Agency, the governmental monitoring agency, and less on the business regulator (OfWat) or the water companies themselves. This difference means that the experiences that I had are very different from those in the book. The book provides, through the case studies, an insight into these different relationships.
Yet, I could see a lot of comparisons between cases that I was involved in and know about and the analysis in the book. In the chapter that discusses the issue of “real science”, there is also a discussion about the way in which actors ostracise members of the marginalised community on the basis that they are activists and therefore can’t be trusted to do the science correctly. As Gwen mentions, this is based on the Mertonian norms, and it appeared in a Nature article about citizen science. If you follow the link, you’ll see that I wrote: ” There are two reasons for this: first, that scientists themselves have a complex set of motivations and are under the same ‘conflict of interests’ and secondly, if motivations having such an impact on science in general, then this is true for every science, not just citizen science.” The issue of data quality, in my view, is based on Scientific Chauvinism as described in the book.
Another thought that the book provoked was about the value of continuous monitoring data, which is shown to be problematic to interpret and use by communities, although the book shows how the interpretation and the inquisitiveness around it provided value to community groups. This is something that I have frequently questioned about environmental information in the wider way. We even came across a case where an air quality monitoring station was set following a planning application and a commitment from the developer to install one. Yet, over 5 years later, when we carried out the study, the data was never accessed or downloaded. The same can be said about other monitoring data, which beyond the calculation of monthly averages or checking against established standards are not being used.
I could also see the connection between the work that Gwen described on the struggles of making sense of the data, with the work that Christian Nold did with communities around Heathrow (especially when we knew that the noise monitoring app that we were using cannot be accurate), or the work of the Making Sense project in Barcelona. The example below, which is taken from the Crowd& the Cloud, is fitting within the framework of the book – althoug there are echoes of “real science” in it.
The one aspect of science of repair that I have more questions on is how things will fit, is the whole issue of the established standards and the rules and regulations that are set for monitoring. The book focuses on community science and citizen science that happens during the operations or the changes in operation of an existing facility. However, at this stage, the standards are already set in regulations. These regulations and the decisions about what is acceptable and how things are measured is an important political and reparative problem. The way in which they are set by scientists (with scientific chauvinism) and industry means that the hands of the local activists are tied behind their back before they start doing anything. Add to this the epistocracy characteristics of environmental decision making, and you see a fundamental problem that requires a different scale of intervention and action by scientists.
It is also very clear that The Science of Repair is highlighting that in environmental justice conditions and arguably beyond, the concept of the scientist as an honest broker is utterly inappropriate and immoral. I could see how many of the aspects that are covered in the book can fit very well within the framework of Post-Normal Science. The expectations that we used an extended peer-community, extended facts (instead of realy science only) and the different role of scientists can all work well.
Overall, the book is very readable, and the ideas are being introduced and scaffolded in a way that it is easy to follow. The illustrated cases, including the example for the Crowd and the Cloud, which you can go and watch. With about 150 pages, it is very accessible, and the suggestions and recommendations are excellent for researchers who want to do research in the context of working with science and marginalised groups. The book is of interest for people in public health, geography, environment and society studies, and surely STS.
### Share this:
* Share on X (Opens in new window) X
* Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
* Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
* Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
* Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
* Print (Opens in new window) Print
* Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
* Share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram
* Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
* Share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp
*
Like Loading...
### _Related_
