Sara Wylie
Biographic Data
| ID | 265162 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sara Wylie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sara |
| FAMILY NAME | Wylie |
| SIGNATURE | WYLIE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northeastern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2096-9260 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 140 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Obligation to Know and the Right to Know: A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication and Datafication
The public's “Right to Know” has been a motivating refrain for the environmental movement from its modern origins. While these policies may be an important component of environmental progress, it is critical to acknowledge the history and ongoing impacts of informating environmentalism. For example, how may information disclosures normalize ongoing harms to communities? How much energy is devoted to tracking the obvious (industries are producing …
Infrastructuring Care: Co-Designing Computational Notebooks for Environmental Data Justice
The 2016 election of Donald Trump heightened the disproportionate risks from toxicants faced by minoritized communities from cuts in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding, reworking environmental health regulations, and obfuscating related information. In response, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)-a US-based network of social scientists, technologists, and activists-was formed to develop an environmental data…
What Does Chelsea Creek Do for You? A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication
Historically, academic and government environmental justice (EJ) research and communication efforts have centered on quantifying, mapping, and visualizing the environmental harms faced by EJ communities (communities facing disproportionate levels of environmental harm). Unangax Education scholar Eve Tuck critiques such frameworks as “damage-centered” because they cast entire communities—predominantly low-income, BIPOC communities—as lacking or le…
Become a Gas Leak Detective!” Evaluating a multigenerational citizen science program for connecting distribution pipelines to energy justice
Pollution inequality 50 years after the Clean Air Act: The need for hyperlocal data and action
Effective solutions require integration of improved data, technology innovations, community engagement, and environmental justice
Learning in Crisis: Training Students to Monitor and Address Irresponsible Knowledge Construction by US Federal Agencies under Trump
Immediately after President Trump’s inauguration, US federal science agencies began deleting information about climate change from their websites, triggering alarm among scientists, environmental activists, and journalists about the administration’s attempt to suppress information about climate change and promulgate climate denialism. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) was founded in late 2016 to build a multidisciplinary colla…
Seeing power with a flashlight: DIY thermal sensing technology in the classroom
This paper contributes to the growing literature on 'making and doing' in Science and Technology Studies (STS) by describing and theorizing the teaching of making and doing. We describe a collaborative do-it-yourself (DIY) technology project taught simultaneously in Canada and the United States, in sociology and public health, to undergraduates with no prior electronics experience. Students built thermal flashlights - low cost digital tools for m…
Situating Data in a Trumpian Era: The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
The Trump administration’s antienvironmental policies and its proclivity to dismiss evidence-based claims creates challenges for environmental politics in a warming world. This article offers the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) as a case study of one way to respond to this political moment. EDGI was started by a small group of Science and Technology Studies and environmental justice researchers and activists in the United Stat…
Pokémon Go, pH, and projectors: Applying transformation design and participatory action research to an environmental justice collaboration in Chelsea, MA
Environmental issues such as climate change and toxic contamination have become a lived reality for communities globally, yet as a society we have been slow to address many of these challenges. While designers have begun partnering with interdisciplinary teams to take on large social issues, the process of design, the timescale of academic work, and the pressing needs of communities experiencing the brunt of these issues are frequently ill-aligne…
The Environmental Protection Agency in the Early Trump Administration: Prelude to Regulatory Capture
We explore and contextualize changes at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the first 6 months of the Trump administration, arguing that its pro-business direction is enabling a form of regulatory capture. We draw on news articles, public documents, and a rapid response, multisited interview study of current and retired EPA employees to (1) document changes associated with the new administration, (2) contextualize and compare the curre…
History of US Presidential Assaults on Modern Environmental Health Protection
The Trump administration has undertaken an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an agency critical to environmental health. This assault has precedents in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The early Reagan administration (1981–1983) launched an overt attack on the EPA, combining deregulation with budget and staff cuts, whereas the George W. Bush administration (2001–2008) adopted a subtler approach, undermi…
Data Resistance: A Social Movement Organizational Autoethnography of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
The dismantlement of evidence-based environmental governance by the Trump administration requires new forms of activism that uphold science and environmental regulatory agencies while critiquing the politics of knowledge production. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) emerged after the November 2016 U.S. presidential elections, becoming an organization of over 175 volunteer researchers, technologists, archivists, and activists…
Participatory Air Monitoring in the Midst of Uncertainty: Residents’ Experiences with the Speck Sensor
How do participants engage in at-home air monitoring in the midst of uncertain exposures to airborne emissions associated with unconventional natural gas development (UNGD) activities? We investigate residents’ experiences with the “Speck” particulate matter sensor with an emerging environmental health resource center called the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project (EHP). In response to the gaps in knowledge about the health impact…
Materializing Exposure: Developing an Indexical Method to Visualize Health Hazards Related to Fossil Fuel Extraction
How can STS researchers collaborate with communities to design environmental monitoring devices that more effectively express their experiences and address gaps in regulation? This paper describes and shows the results of a novel method of visualizing environmental emissions of corrosive gases such as hydrogen sulfide (H2S) exposure using photographic paper. H2S is a neurotoxic and flammable gas that smells like rotten eggs and is frequently asso…
Environmental Data Justice and the Trump Administration: Reflections from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) was formed after the U.S. presidential elections in November 2016 to respond to the threat posed by the Trump administration to environmental data and policy, and to federal environmental agencies. During his campaign, Trump was openly hostile to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and to the science of climate change. Since taking office, Trump's administration has taken steps to radi…
Making and Doing Politics Through Grassroots Scientific Research on the Energy and Petrochemical Industries
The high stakes of emergent environmental crises, from climate change to widespread toxic exposures, have motivated STS practitioners to innovate methodologically, including leveraging STS scholarship to actively remake environmental scientific practice and technologies. This thematic collection brings together current research that transforms how communities and academics identify, study, and collectively respond to contaminants engendered by th…
Introduction to the Special Forum on Critical Making as Research Program
This special issue spotlights the growing diversity of critical making practices in a range of disciplinary contexts both inside and outside of the academy, and begins to develop perspectives that will foster the emergence of critical making as a coherent field. On one hand, we see great value in incorporating material practices into existing information systems (IS) and science and technology studies (STS) research programs. In particular, forms…
Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research
This article explores the changing relationship between the academy and new public formations of scientific research, which we term “civic technoscience.” Civic technoscience leverages tactics seen in critical making communities to question and transform how and who can make credible and actionable knowledge. A comparison of two case studies is used. The first is a grassroots mapping process that allows communities to generate high-quality aerial…
Politics, ecology, and the new anthropology of energy: Exploring the Emerging Frontiers of Hydraulic Fracking
This article reviews recent literature relevant to the ongoing shale gas boom and introduces the Journal of Political Ecology's Special Section on hydraulic fracking. We highlight the need for ethnographic studies of the tumultuous social and physical transformations resulting from, and produced by, an unfolding frontier of energy production that unsettles social, economic, and ecological landscapes. We examine how intercommunity connections are …
WellWatch: Reflections on Designing Digital Media for Multisited Para-Ethnography
WellWatch was a webtool designed to create a collaborative space for communities and academics to monitor, study, and respond more effectively to the emerging shale gas industry. This article reflects on the successes and failures of the first iteration of WellWatch for academic research and its community of nonacademic participants. For academics, this tool succeeded in gathering rich narratives of the personal experiences of people living amids…
Hormone Mimics and their Promise of Significant Otherness
Some scientists argue that we face a worldwide reproductive crisis known as ‘endocrine disruption’, a term used to encompass the effects of hormonally active chemicals in our environment. Everyday chemicals such as plastics, pesticides and flame retardants can mimic hormones and thereby disrupt the reproductive, neurological and immunological development of humans and other animals. This surprising discovery is causing consternation in scientific…
Politics, ecology, and the new anthropology of energy: Exploring the Emerging Frontiers of Hydraulic Fracking
This article reviews recent literature relevant to the ongoing shale gas boom and introduces the Journal of Political Ecology's Special Section on hydraulic fracking. We highlight the need for ethnographic studies of the tumultuous social and physical transformations resulting from, and produced by, an unfolding frontier of energy production that unsettles social, economic, and ecological landscapes. We examine how intercommunity connections are …
Making and Doing Politics Through Grassroots Scientific Research on the Energy and Petrochemical Industries
The high stakes of emergent environmental crises, from climate change to widespread toxic exposures, have motivated STS practitioners to innovate methodologically, including leveraging STS scholarship to actively remake environmental scientific practice and technologies. This thematic collection brings together current research that transforms how communities and academics identify, study, and collectively respond to contaminants engendered by th…
The Environmental Protection Agency in the Early Trump Administration: Prelude to Regulatory Capture
We explore and contextualize changes at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the first 6 months of the Trump administration, arguing that its pro-business direction is enabling a form of regulatory capture. We draw on news articles, public documents, and a rapid response, multisited interview study of current and retired EPA employees to (1) document changes associated with the new administration, (2) contextualize and compare the curre…
Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research
This article explores the changing relationship between the academy and new public formations of scientific research, which we term “civic technoscience.” Civic technoscience leverages tactics seen in critical making communities to question and transform how and who can make credible and actionable knowledge. A comparison of two case studies is used. The first is a grassroots mapping process that allows communities to generate high-quality aerial…
Situating Data in a Trumpian Era: The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
The Trump administration’s antienvironmental policies and its proclivity to dismiss evidence-based claims creates challenges for environmental politics in a warming world. This article offers the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) as a case study of one way to respond to this political moment. EDGI was started by a small group of Science and Technology Studies and environmental justice researchers and activists in the United Stat…
History of US Presidential Assaults on Modern Environmental Health Protection
The Trump administration has undertaken an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an agency critical to environmental health. This assault has precedents in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The early Reagan administration (1981–1983) launched an overt attack on the EPA, combining deregulation with budget and staff cuts, whereas the George W. Bush administration (2001–2008) adopted a subtler approach, undermi…
WellWatch: Reflections on Designing Digital Media for Multisited Para-Ethnography
WellWatch was a webtool designed to create a collaborative space for communities and academics to monitor, study, and respond more effectively to the emerging shale gas industry. This article reflects on the successes and failures of the first iteration of WellWatch for academic research and its community of nonacademic participants. For academics, this tool succeeded in gathering rich narratives of the personal experiences of people living amids…
Data Resistance: A Social Movement Organizational Autoethnography of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
The dismantlement of evidence-based environmental governance by the Trump administration requires new forms of activism that uphold science and environmental regulatory agencies while critiquing the politics of knowledge production. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) emerged after the November 2016 U.S. presidential elections, becoming an organization of over 175 volunteer researchers, technologists, archivists, and activists…
Introduction to the Special Forum on Critical Making as Research Program
This special issue spotlights the growing diversity of critical making practices in a range of disciplinary contexts both inside and outside of the academy, and begins to develop perspectives that will foster the emergence of critical making as a coherent field. On one hand, we see great value in incorporating material practices into existing information systems (IS) and science and technology studies (STS) research programs. In particular, forms…
Become a Gas Leak Detective!” Evaluating a multigenerational citizen science program for connecting distribution pipelines to energy justice
Seeing power with a flashlight: DIY thermal sensing technology in the classroom
This paper contributes to the growing literature on 'making and doing' in Science and Technology Studies (STS) by describing and theorizing the teaching of making and doing. We describe a collaborative do-it-yourself (DIY) technology project taught simultaneously in Canada and the United States, in sociology and public health, to undergraduates with no prior electronics experience. Students built thermal flashlights - low cost digital tools for m…
Hormone Mimics and their Promise of Significant Otherness
Some scientists argue that we face a worldwide reproductive crisis known as ‘endocrine disruption’, a term used to encompass the effects of hormonally active chemicals in our environment. Everyday chemicals such as plastics, pesticides and flame retardants can mimic hormones and thereby disrupt the reproductive, neurological and immunological development of humans and other animals. This surprising discovery is causing consternation in scientific…
Introduction to the Special Forum on Critical Making as Research Program
This special issue spotlights the growing diversity of critical making practices in a range of disciplinary contexts both inside and outside of the academy, and begins to develop perspectives that will foster the emergence of critical making as a coherent field. On one hand, we see great value in incorporating material practices into existing information systems (IS) and science and technology studies (STS) research programs. In particular, forms…
Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research
This article explores the changing relationship between the academy and new public formations of scientific research, which we term “civic technoscience.” Civic technoscience leverages tactics seen in critical making communities to question and transform how and who can make credible and actionable knowledge. A comparison of two case studies is used. The first is a grassroots mapping process that allows communities to generate high-quality aerial…
Politics, ecology, and the new anthropology of energy: Exploring the Emerging Frontiers of Hydraulic Fracking
This article reviews recent literature relevant to the ongoing shale gas boom and introduces the Journal of Political Ecology's Special Section on hydraulic fracking. We highlight the need for ethnographic studies of the tumultuous social and physical transformations resulting from, and produced by, an unfolding frontier of energy production that unsettles social, economic, and ecological landscapes. We examine how intercommunity connections are …
WellWatch: Reflections on Designing Digital Media for Multisited Para-Ethnography
WellWatch was a webtool designed to create a collaborative space for communities and academics to monitor, study, and respond more effectively to the emerging shale gas industry. This article reflects on the successes and failures of the first iteration of WellWatch for academic research and its community of nonacademic participants. For academics, this tool succeeded in gathering rich narratives of the personal experiences of people living amids…
Participatory Air Monitoring in the Midst of Uncertainty: Residents’ Experiences with the Speck Sensor
How do participants engage in at-home air monitoring in the midst of uncertain exposures to airborne emissions associated with unconventional natural gas development (UNGD) activities? We investigate residents’ experiences with the “Speck” particulate matter sensor with an emerging environmental health resource center called the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project (EHP). In response to the gaps in knowledge about the health impact…
Materializing Exposure: Developing an Indexical Method to Visualize Health Hazards Related to Fossil Fuel Extraction
How can STS researchers collaborate with communities to design environmental monitoring devices that more effectively express their experiences and address gaps in regulation? This paper describes and shows the results of a novel method of visualizing environmental emissions of corrosive gases such as hydrogen sulfide (H2S) exposure using photographic paper. H2S is a neurotoxic and flammable gas that smells like rotten eggs and is frequently asso…
Environmental Data Justice and the Trump Administration: Reflections from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) was formed after the U.S. presidential elections in November 2016 to respond to the threat posed by the Trump administration to environmental data and policy, and to federal environmental agencies. During his campaign, Trump was openly hostile to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and to the science of climate change. Since taking office, Trump's administration has taken steps to radi…
Making and Doing Politics Through Grassroots Scientific Research on the Energy and Petrochemical Industries
The high stakes of emergent environmental crises, from climate change to widespread toxic exposures, have motivated STS practitioners to innovate methodologically, including leveraging STS scholarship to actively remake environmental scientific practice and technologies. This thematic collection brings together current research that transforms how communities and academics identify, study, and collectively respond to contaminants engendered by th…
Pokémon Go, pH, and projectors: Applying transformation design and participatory action research to an environmental justice collaboration in Chelsea, MA
Environmental issues such as climate change and toxic contamination have become a lived reality for communities globally, yet as a society we have been slow to address many of these challenges. While designers have begun partnering with interdisciplinary teams to take on large social issues, the process of design, the timescale of academic work, and the pressing needs of communities experiencing the brunt of these issues are frequently ill-aligne…
The Environmental Protection Agency in the Early Trump Administration: Prelude to Regulatory Capture
We explore and contextualize changes at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the first 6 months of the Trump administration, arguing that its pro-business direction is enabling a form of regulatory capture. We draw on news articles, public documents, and a rapid response, multisited interview study of current and retired EPA employees to (1) document changes associated with the new administration, (2) contextualize and compare the curre…
History of US Presidential Assaults on Modern Environmental Health Protection
The Trump administration has undertaken an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an agency critical to environmental health. This assault has precedents in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The early Reagan administration (1981–1983) launched an overt attack on the EPA, combining deregulation with budget and staff cuts, whereas the George W. Bush administration (2001–2008) adopted a subtler approach, undermi…
Data Resistance: A Social Movement Organizational Autoethnography of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
The dismantlement of evidence-based environmental governance by the Trump administration requires new forms of activism that uphold science and environmental regulatory agencies while critiquing the politics of knowledge production. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) emerged after the November 2016 U.S. presidential elections, becoming an organization of over 175 volunteer researchers, technologists, archivists, and activists…
Seeing power with a flashlight: DIY thermal sensing technology in the classroom
This paper contributes to the growing literature on 'making and doing' in Science and Technology Studies (STS) by describing and theorizing the teaching of making and doing. We describe a collaborative do-it-yourself (DIY) technology project taught simultaneously in Canada and the United States, in sociology and public health, to undergraduates with no prior electronics experience. Students built thermal flashlights - low cost digital tools for m…
Situating Data in a Trumpian Era: The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative
The Trump administration’s antienvironmental policies and its proclivity to dismiss evidence-based claims creates challenges for environmental politics in a warming world. This article offers the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) as a case study of one way to respond to this political moment. EDGI was started by a small group of Science and Technology Studies and environmental justice researchers and activists in the United Stat…
Learning in Crisis: Training Students to Monitor and Address Irresponsible Knowledge Construction by US Federal Agencies under Trump
Immediately after President Trump’s inauguration, US federal science agencies began deleting information about climate change from their websites, triggering alarm among scientists, environmental activists, and journalists about the administration’s attempt to suppress information about climate change and promulgate climate denialism. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) was founded in late 2016 to build a multidisciplinary colla…
Pollution inequality 50 years after the Clean Air Act: The need for hyperlocal data and action
Effective solutions require integration of improved data, technology innovations, community engagement, and environmental justice
What Does Chelsea Creek Do for You? A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication
Historically, academic and government environmental justice (EJ) research and communication efforts have centered on quantifying, mapping, and visualizing the environmental harms faced by EJ communities (communities facing disproportionate levels of environmental harm). Unangax Education scholar Eve Tuck critiques such frameworks as “damage-centered” because they cast entire communities—predominantly low-income, BIPOC communities—as lacking or le…
Become a Gas Leak Detective!” Evaluating a multigenerational citizen science program for connecting distribution pipelines to energy justice
The Obligation to Know and the Right to Know: A Relational Approach to Environmental Justice Communication and Datafication
The public's “Right to Know” has been a motivating refrain for the environmental movement from its modern origins. While these policies may be an important component of environmental progress, it is critical to acknowledge the history and ongoing impacts of informating environmentalism. For example, how may information disclosures normalize ongoing harms to communities? How much energy is devoted to tracking the obvious (industries are producing …
Infrastructuring Care: Co-Designing Computational Notebooks for Environmental Data Justice
The 2016 election of Donald Trump heightened the disproportionate risks from toxicants faced by minoritized communities from cuts in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding, reworking environmental health regulations, and obfuscating related information. In response, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)-a US-based network of social scientists, technologists, and activists-was formed to develop an environmental data…
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (9 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Environmental justice (7 works) · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Public Administration (6 works)