We are delighted to announce that the 2020 Rachel Carson Prize goes to Sara Ann Wylie, for Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds (Duke University Press, 2018). The Award Committee received 78 books to consider for the prize and shortlisted 10 works for this year’s prize, evaluating books for their overall scholarly quality, their contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies, and their capacity to cast social or political issues in a new light. We found Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds to be exemplary across all three of these criteria.
Wylie’s interdisciplinary book contributes to a range of fields of interest to STS scholars, including postcolonial anthropology, digital-media studies, citizen science, and environmental health and justice movements. Wylie traces the history of fracking and its landscape transformations. Wylie also provides insights into how nonprofits, landowners, and community organizers create novel digital platforms and databases, like the Landman Report Card and WellWatch, to track unconventional oil and gas well development and document fracking’s environmental and human health impacts. These online, user-generated databasing and mapping tools help connect academics with grassroots movements, toward holding government regulators and the fossil fuel industry accountable for their often invisible actions.
The Carson Prize Committee recognized the important reach of Wylie’s book. In addition to its thorough portrait of the ground-level realities experienced by fracking communities, Wylie models how making and doing in STS practice can develop civic infrastructures that contribute to social justice.
For all its contributions, we are pleased and honored to recognize Sara Ann Wylie’s Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds with the 2020 Rachel Carson Prize.
2020 Carson Prize Committee
Roopali Phadke (Chair, Macalester College, US), Aalok Khandekar (IIT Hyderabad, India), Maria Belen Albornoz (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Ecuador), Hsin-Hsing Chen (Shih-Hsin University Graduate Institute, Taiwan).
This award means so much to me as a recognition and gift from the Society for Social Studies of Science community, a community that has nurtured this work from the ground up. I have benefited from a truly gifted group of advisors and colleagues who have helped me chart my course. Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds was not easy for me to write. It came into this world messy, confused and screaming. The first 900-page draft, written over a 3 month period of night-shifts, had no citations, much to the distress of my perspicacious advisor Stefan Helmreich. Anyone who knows me well knows that my grasp of grammar is tenuous at best. It took years of work and reams of Post-It notes to cut the book down to its current form. I credit the influence of Theo Colborn, the renowned environmental scientist whose work the book theorizes, who, early in this study, reminded me to do my work and go and do good in bringing the book to fruition. I was driven by a need not to disappoint Theo or the people whose story Fractivism tells. So this award means a lot to me.
Along with offering sincere gratitude for this honor, I’d like to also acknowledge two struggles I am encountering while writing this piece. First is the struggle of knowing that a book is not enough. I feel deeply Fractivism’s insufficiency. Fracking was built on stories: stories promising energy independence, and transitions to green energy without somehow producing a transition in our fossil dependent system of international governance, finance, industry, and agriculture. The stories that propelled fracking into reality never properly explored, discussed or evaluated our shared vulnerability to the profoundly risky and precarious systems we’ve brought into being and called progress. These stories did not do justice to those harmed as fracking spread across the US. 17.6 million Americans now live within a mile of an oil or gas well; people like Rick Roles, who took his copy of Fractivism to the hospital with him so he could show it to his doctors and have his daughter read it to him as he struggled for his life. He lost that struggle and died alone on his property surrounded by the wells he felt caused his illness.
We desperately need to build a public health infrastructure that supports people like Rick that does not disregard, dismiss and exclude his experiences. We desperately need different systems of technology regulation and development so that technologies like fracking are never developed in the first place. We need a different education system that trains engineers, scientists and social scientists in a worldview that accepts the interdependence of all systems as a fundamental precept. There is much work to be done. We need to be building all of these things now and in concert.
And my second conflict is the award system itself which derives in part from building our work through frameworks of competition rather than collaboration. I wrestle with my own desire to be recognized in this way, but I also recognize the harms of the competitive state we have built for each other, a state that in its corrosive form can drive us toward awards rather than towards transformation; one that honors the storytellers but falls short of addressing the story; one that fails to turn knowledge of harm into prevention of harm. What more can we offer each other than competition? How do we build scaffolds that support each of us and give room for our complimentary gifts to grow and flourish, and, of most importance, results in the transformation of these harmful systems?
Theo Colborn embodied this kind of work: she developed a non-profit that operated alongside but was not confined by the hierarchies of the academy, she published her work for the public, in peer-reviewed journals, and took her findings to Congress. How can our society do more to help build such systems for our work through collaborating with other professional societies, providing training in writing Op-eds, working to build, fund and otherwise support different kinds of research organizations, encouraging written and non-written forms of critical work, and training us in communicating with and to policymakers? Our field has much to offer in this precarious time. The work by researchers in our field has moved me to new questions, to tears, to action, to care more and motivated me to write this book.
This work was made possible by the many gifts people shared with me along the way, the gift of their stories and experiences, the gift of their trust, the gift of my mentors’ knowledge, insight, encouragement and critique, the gift of funding from both NSF and foundation fellowships, the gift of my editors helping the prose of Fractivism to shine, the gift of my research and administrative assistants helping me balance the books, track down the image rights and all the necessary t-crossing and i-dotting, the gifts of my family and friends’ patience, support and care. Reflecting on this abundance, I am humbled and indebted by this gift and reminded of this kernel of (dare I say the word in an STS context) truth: the deepest value is our work for each other and the gifts we have to give.
Sara Wylie, PhD, is an Assistant Professor Sociology/Anthropology and Health Science in Northeastern University’s Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute (SSEHRI). She is a cofounder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), a network of academics and non-profits working to preserve federal environmental data and monitor changes to federal environmental policy through website tracking and interviews. Sara is a cofounder of Public Lab, a non-profit that develops open source, Do-It-Yourself tools for community-based environmental analysis. Her book Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds, published by Duke University Press, describes the need to rethink the extractive research systems that proceed and enable extractive industries.