November 15, 2021 | Reflections
Sophia Rossmann is a PhD candidate at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich. She works as a research associate in the project Situating Environmental Epigenetics, which comparatively studies how approaches from environmental epigenetics are adopted in three research fields of nutritional epidemiology, environmental toxicology, and the pathophysiology of mood & anxiety.
You are currently involved in a large-scale research project on environmental epigenetics. How does your own research contribute to recent STS debates?
In my dissertation project, I investigate how environmental epigenetics is adopted in the field of environmental toxicology. This is part of a larger project called “Situating Environmental Epigenetics. A Comparative, Actor-Centered Study of Environmental Epigenetics as an Emergent Research Approach in Three Research Fields”, funded by the German Research Council. While there already exists important STS work on how environmental epigenetics has been taken up in research investigating health effects of, for example, nutrition, trauma and stress, only very few studies have yet empirically analysed how research communities apply the approach in research on toxicants (e.g., Lamoreaux 2016; Mansfield 2012; Lappé 2016). So, what we are contributing is an in-depth empirical study on how epigenetics is becoming relevant for environmental toxicology more widely and across several intersecting disciplines. That means, talking to different researchers in the field, analysing their articles, and going to laboratories and scientific conferences to investigate the emerging knowledge formations. Moreover, what we can already see is how the proximity to the regulatory science is particularly interesting here as it opens up a different set of questions and interventions compared to mental health or nutritional research, which we are also analysing in our project.
In your PhD project, you study the long-term health effects of toxins among other things. What is the role of environmental knowledge in such research?
This question ties right in with the peculiarities of different fields adopting environmental epigenetics. In my PhD project, I see how epigenetic research on toxicants raises distinct questions how to operationalise environment(s) in research designs. Environmental toxicologists tend to grasp toxicants as pre-existing entities that are out there in the environment and can be easily ordered online to be applied in experimental research designs. However, this potentially obscures that there is not only a material but also social dimension to toxicants with specific exposures being unequally distributed among various groups and places. It prompts us to carefully unpack what is made part of the environment in epigenetic research and whatnot.
Simultaneously, we see a development to rearticulate toxicity as processual and relational through epigenetic research: a dynamic socio-material process that stretches over the life course and potentially generations. This process makes latent effects of toxic exposure visible which otherwise perhaps would only show 20 years later, as much as understanding toxicity as entangled with particular exposure histories, place, experiences, and local biologies. This complicates what is considered as ‘environment’ in toxicological research designs. We see how this shift resonates with and inscribes itself into parallel research strands to study chemical mixtures or the “exposome”, which encompasses over 100 exposures. Here, epigenetics becomes relevant for the community as a new mechanism to show how a mix of exposures can have different effects on bodies than when studying toxicants in isolation or adding up their individual effects mathematically. Environment increasingly enters toxicological laboratories as something that needs to mirror actual exposure situations across life courses to understand the long-term health effects of toxicants, even if the practicalities of how to do this seem yet to be negotiated.
Your current research is grounded in an ethnographic methodology. You discussed in a recent article the possibilities and limitations of conducting ethnographic fieldwork during the pandemic. How has ethnographic research changed since the outbreak of COVID-19?
This is a topic that has been widely discussed in the STS community. Just search for “virtual ethnography COVID-19 pandemic” and you find a range of inspiring blog posts dealing precisely with this question (e.g., DeHart 2020; Gosh 2020). In my essay, I discuss how I had to adjust my plans of doing a lab ethnography at an institute of epidemiology due to the COVID-19 restrictions switching to a virtual mode. Conducting an online lab ethnography, where the illusion of clear field boundaries is usually most vivid as an actual place you need to go to, brings its own challenges: while many research activities moved into the virtual space others continued offline. How to access these spaces through virtual ethnographic vision?
I eventually did have the chance to go to the institute when the COVID-19 restrictions got partly lifted. This allowed me to enter these inaccessible spaces I was concerned to miss out on, such as the laboratory. Or to hop around the city from research site to research site, literally following the logic of cohort research around town and to discover spaces that I didn’t have on my radar before that are part of the story.
If we think in terms of patchy ethnography, the pandemic created a situation where I ended up doing a hybrid ethnography. This allowed me to build slow relationships and stay connected over longer periods of time. It created a situation where I’ve been following the institute for over one year, instead of five weeks on-site as initially planned. While this hybrid format could have been possible without COVID-19, I changed my style to conduct a lab ethnography only through this rupture. Perhaps these kinds of patchy experiences will shape future ethnographic research more widely.
To what extent has the COVID-19 crisis affected your research agenda?
Not only ethnographic research was impacted by the pandemic, but also the research practices at the institute. So, I think we shouldn’t consider COVID-19 just as a disturbance external to our fieldwork. However, circling back to your question on environmental knowledge, it actually becomes another environment internal to knowledge production on epigenetics. For example, the researchers I follow uses epigenetic data collected in cohort studies to investigate how air pollution impacts health outcomes via epigenetic mechanisms. Since the fieldworkers couldn’t visit the participants in their homes anymore, they had to come up with different methods to measure air pollution. Instead of giving the participants backpacks with air sensors to be carried around, they installed several sensors across the city to get information on air pollution levels matching them with GPS data provided via phones. This example allows us to approach the question of how environments are constructed in research designs from a different angle: What counts as air pollution and in which contexts? How can this data be gathered? What difference does it make to collect air pollution levels as stratified and not individualised data across town? This shows how even within the same study air pollution is not a stable entity but negotiable and constructed in specific contexts under specific circumstances – something the pandemic foregrounded.
What future plans do you have for your research?
I’m currently not planning any new projects but trying to focus on my doctoral thesis, making sense of my ethnographic material. I’m specifically interested in the placenta as an emerging bio-object to enact toxicity as a process in environmental toxicology. Related to this, my colleague Georgia Samaras and I just organised a panel at the 4S 2021 titled “Practicing Process Ontology in and with Biological Research” to initiate a discussion on how we can think with process ontologies in STS. So, let’s see what conceptual work on the process will come out of there.
Published: 11/15/2021