Dr. Gwen Ottinger, "Epistemic Aspects of Environmental Justice", Working Wednesdays

polluting structure in a mountainscape

RSVP here!


Communities heavily burdened by pollution are often told that their knowledge doesn’t count, or that their questions are irrelevant to environmental protection. This failure to recognize community members as knowers is a distinct form of harm, known as epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustices are entangled with environmental injustice; as a result, successful environmental justice initiatives need to include explicit efforts to foster epistemic justice. 


Gwen Ottinger is Associate Professor in Drexel University’s Department of Politics and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society.  She has received a CAREER grant from the NSF and an Burkhardt Fellowship from the ACLS. She is the author of Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges


PPEH offers a lunch series, Working Wednesdays, designed to showcase in-progress Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) straddling theoretical and practical environmental concerns. These sessions take place on Wednesdays, 12:30-1:30 sharp.

All sessions are open to the Penn community but require RSVP. Grab a lunch and join us on Zoom!