Start Date
26-6-2010 1:00 PM
End Date
26-6-2010 2:30 PM
Description
This presentation is part of the Social Values in Medical Research track.
Due to higher than national average breast cancer rates and deaths on Long Island the U.S. Congress in 1993 ordered a study of breast cancer on the island. The Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project (LIBCSP), federally funded under Public Law 103-43, conducted by the National Cancer Institute in collaboration with the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, is aimed at investigating environmental causes of breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute states “[t]he LIBCSP consists of more than 10 studies that include human population (epidemiologic) studies, the establishment of a family breast and ovarian cancer registry, and laboratory research on mechanisms of action and susceptibility in development of breast cancer.” Women on Long Island have long suspected that their breast cancer was linked to various environmental causes, such as pesticide spraying for mosquitoes, municipal waste, and industrial air pollution and water pollution.
In Bayview Hunters Point, California there are also women who suspect that their breast cancer and other illnesses in their community are linked to industrial air pollution, water pollution, municipal waste, and radiation from a local Naval shipyard. A locally conducted study of these women, which ran from 1987-1993 and was published in 1995, also reveals higher than national average rates of breast cancer and deaths in this community. In fact, recent studies from 2007 show them to have one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the country. Yet unlike the women of Long Island, the women of Bayview Hunters Point were not written into a congressionally backed and federally funded research effort that consisted of any studies, let alone ten studies. There is no National Cancer Institute “Bayview Hunters Point Breast Cancer Study Project.” How are we to account for the disparities in research priorities and funding? There are two significant demographic differences that differently situate these communities: race and class, which, as Nancy Krieger and Mary Bassett argue in “The Health of Black Folk: Disease, Class, and Ideology in Science” “correlate with health because race is a powerful determinant of the location and life-destinies of individuals within the class structure of U.S. society.”
The breast cancer rates from Bayview Hunters Point reflect illness and deaths of African American women who live below the poverty line, where as the women of Long Island are, by in large, white and affluent. The failure of the government to fund a study akin to the Long Island study is even more worrisome considering that African American women are more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. The National Cancer Institute reports 33.5 deaths per 100,000 for Black women compared to 24.4 deaths per 100,000 for white women. In the case of Long Island the death rate for the two counties of concern, Nassau and Suffolk, was 28.0 and 29.0 per 100,000 , which is higher than the national average, but not higher than the mortality rate for Black women. My point here is not to denigrate the efforts of Long Island activists, but to question why these women were able to get support for a federally funded study while the illness and deaths of the women of Bayview Hunters Point goes unnoticed? Race and class not only the situated the Long Island women such that they had resources to make themselves heard, but also such that their lives and their deaths were more noticeable. Because of the multiple levels of oppression, the women of Bayview Hunters Point had to develop alternative resources, methods, and coalitions through which to be heard and to create change.
In this paper I employ the experiences and activism of the women of Bayview Hunters Point (BVHP), focusing specifically on a community citizens-science group called the Mothers Committee, to analyze arguments for situated knowledges. I argue that situated knowledge positions have evolved over the past 25 years toward “increasingly concrete engagements” that are better able to account for the complexity of human living. The view that all knowers and knowledge are situated is one of the most important and tangible insights generated in feminist science studies. It has resulted in epistemological and methodological reframings of scientific practices and has led to ongoing critical work in feminist science studies and feminist epistemology. Although Donna Haraway was the first to use the term “situated knowledges” in her 1991 essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” it has been developed more fully in feminist philosophy of science in recent years by such writers as Sandra Harding and Lorraine Code , and has been enhanced by work outside of science studies by feminist theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins , Sarah Hoagland , Chandra Mohanty, and Chela Sandoval.
In this paper I argue that situation is a vital epistemic location that is salient to its members, it is a place to know, and it is a place from which to initiate transformative practices, as well as a place that is transformed. I study the physical and epistemological location of the Mothers Committee and argue that this positioning generated a methodology that they strategically employed to study their community, form coalitions with other groups, critique environmental racism, and physically transform their community. The Mother Committee provides an apt example of the increasingly concrete engagements that situated knowledges arguments have moved toward. Furthermore, the lives of the people of Bayview Hunters Point and the work of the Mothers Committee are a critical example of environmental, health, and racial injustice and a powerful example of how communities resist injustice. Thus, the equally important goal of this paper is to highlight just how this community is subjected to, experiences, and resists injustice.
PowerPoint presentation
Situating Knowledge through the Mothers Committee of Bayview Hunters Point
This presentation is part of the Social Values in Medical Research track.
Due to higher than national average breast cancer rates and deaths on Long Island the U.S. Congress in 1993 ordered a study of breast cancer on the island. The Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project (LIBCSP), federally funded under Public Law 103-43, conducted by the National Cancer Institute in collaboration with the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, is aimed at investigating environmental causes of breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute states “[t]he LIBCSP consists of more than 10 studies that include human population (epidemiologic) studies, the establishment of a family breast and ovarian cancer registry, and laboratory research on mechanisms of action and susceptibility in development of breast cancer.” Women on Long Island have long suspected that their breast cancer was linked to various environmental causes, such as pesticide spraying for mosquitoes, municipal waste, and industrial air pollution and water pollution.
In Bayview Hunters Point, California there are also women who suspect that their breast cancer and other illnesses in their community are linked to industrial air pollution, water pollution, municipal waste, and radiation from a local Naval shipyard. A locally conducted study of these women, which ran from 1987-1993 and was published in 1995, also reveals higher than national average rates of breast cancer and deaths in this community. In fact, recent studies from 2007 show them to have one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the country. Yet unlike the women of Long Island, the women of Bayview Hunters Point were not written into a congressionally backed and federally funded research effort that consisted of any studies, let alone ten studies. There is no National Cancer Institute “Bayview Hunters Point Breast Cancer Study Project.” How are we to account for the disparities in research priorities and funding? There are two significant demographic differences that differently situate these communities: race and class, which, as Nancy Krieger and Mary Bassett argue in “The Health of Black Folk: Disease, Class, and Ideology in Science” “correlate with health because race is a powerful determinant of the location and life-destinies of individuals within the class structure of U.S. society.”
The breast cancer rates from Bayview Hunters Point reflect illness and deaths of African American women who live below the poverty line, where as the women of Long Island are, by in large, white and affluent. The failure of the government to fund a study akin to the Long Island study is even more worrisome considering that African American women are more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. The National Cancer Institute reports 33.5 deaths per 100,000 for Black women compared to 24.4 deaths per 100,000 for white women. In the case of Long Island the death rate for the two counties of concern, Nassau and Suffolk, was 28.0 and 29.0 per 100,000 , which is higher than the national average, but not higher than the mortality rate for Black women. My point here is not to denigrate the efforts of Long Island activists, but to question why these women were able to get support for a federally funded study while the illness and deaths of the women of Bayview Hunters Point goes unnoticed? Race and class not only the situated the Long Island women such that they had resources to make themselves heard, but also such that their lives and their deaths were more noticeable. Because of the multiple levels of oppression, the women of Bayview Hunters Point had to develop alternative resources, methods, and coalitions through which to be heard and to create change.
In this paper I employ the experiences and activism of the women of Bayview Hunters Point (BVHP), focusing specifically on a community citizens-science group called the Mothers Committee, to analyze arguments for situated knowledges. I argue that situated knowledge positions have evolved over the past 25 years toward “increasingly concrete engagements” that are better able to account for the complexity of human living. The view that all knowers and knowledge are situated is one of the most important and tangible insights generated in feminist science studies. It has resulted in epistemological and methodological reframings of scientific practices and has led to ongoing critical work in feminist science studies and feminist epistemology. Although Donna Haraway was the first to use the term “situated knowledges” in her 1991 essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” it has been developed more fully in feminist philosophy of science in recent years by such writers as Sandra Harding and Lorraine Code , and has been enhanced by work outside of science studies by feminist theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins , Sarah Hoagland , Chandra Mohanty, and Chela Sandoval.
In this paper I argue that situation is a vital epistemic location that is salient to its members, it is a place to know, and it is a place from which to initiate transformative practices, as well as a place that is transformed. I study the physical and epistemological location of the Mothers Committee and argue that this positioning generated a methodology that they strategically employed to study their community, form coalitions with other groups, critique environmental racism, and physically transform their community. The Mother Committee provides an apt example of the increasingly concrete engagements that situated knowledges arguments have moved toward. Furthermore, the lives of the people of Bayview Hunters Point and the work of the Mothers Committee are a critical example of environmental, health, and racial injustice and a powerful example of how communities resist injustice. Thus, the equally important goal of this paper is to highlight just how this community is subjected to, experiences, and resists injustice.