Decolonizing Science: Episode 1

This interview features Priyanka deSouza and Jia-Hui Lee, two MIT PhD researchers whose work revolves around issues of Decolonizing Science. Moderating this conversation is CoLab producer Emmett McKinney, with musical stylings by Antonio Moya-Latorre. A transcription of the conversation is below.

Emmett McKinney: And we are alive. So welcome to CoLab Radio. This is our first episode of the 2020 season. We are a publication of the Community Innovators Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. CoLab Radio is a platform dedicated to prioritizing first person narratives and trying to put urban science in the context of the lived experiences of communities. We are excited to kick off this podcast again with two guests -  two doctoral students from MIT - who are here to talk about decolonizing science. So Jia-Hui Lee and Priyanka deSouza. I'd be happy for you to introduce yourselves. 

Jia-Hui Lee: Hi, so my name is Jia-Hui and I'm a PhD student at MIT in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society program. My research is about people in Tanzania who work very closely with rodents. So that could be scientists, people who train rodents, people who are taking care of pest management. And really what I'm interested in is how they think about rodents. What kinds of knowledge are they producing out of their interactions with rodents?

Priyanka deSouza: And I'm Priyanka deSouza. I'm a PhD researcher at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. I study air pollution from both a scientific and an urban planning perspective. Jia-Hui and I met at a party. And as you heard, we both study such different things. Jia-Hui studies rodent scientists and I study air pollution. And yet there was so many common themes that ran through our work. So I'm really excited to be collaborating with him on this podcast on decolonizing science today. Jia-Hui, do you want to kick us off with really talking about the history of decolonization and put our conversation into context?

Jia-Hui Lee: So in the context of the continent, African continent, decolonization is something that happened in the mid-century of the last century, the 20th century. So in the end of the 50s, beginning with Ghana in 1957, many African countries were successful in their struggle for independence. And so the next 10-15 years were described as years of decolonization where there was a lot of hope and ambition about developing the country, providing modern social services, using science and technology to really change development and progress on the continent. But obviously, after more than 50 years now, these struggles are still ongoing, as we can tell with the more recent calls for decolonization coming out of places like South Africa.

Priyanka deSouza: I think it's really telling that in South Africa more than 20 years after the end of apartheid, in 2015, students at the University of Cape Town started the #RhodesMustFall movement protesting against the presence of a statue of Cecil Rhodes on campus. And just to give you some context, Cecil Rhodes was one of the most vile colonizers who looted Southern Africa. He was the founder of the mining company De Beers. And although the movement started with protests against the presence of the statue that whitewashed Rhodes’ bloody legacy, the movement also wanted to decolonize the different structures of the university, starting from the diversity of the student body and faculty. The students also wanted to decolonize the curriculum that they were studying as it did not reflect their local concerns. It did not provide them with the tools to address the inequalities of knowledge production that further limited their voices and their contributions. So the students were really pushing for true decolonization of the university system to re-center local knowledges. And this applied to the natural sciences as well. And interestingly, the #RhodesMustFall movement has spread to many universities around the world, including the University of Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Ghana... It was incredible to see how the message of the movement resonated with students worldwide.

Jia-Hui Lee: Yeah and that's really interesting Priyanka, because what we're seeing, I think, are not just calls for representation, which is really important as you point out, but also calls to re-center knowledges that come from these places. I was wondering if you've seen any examples of this from your work with air pollution?

Priyanka deSouza: I think about how do we decolonize air pollution science a lot these days, especially because over the course of 2019, I interviewed about 30 fantastic scientists working on air pollution in the Global South. And a lot of what I'm going to be saying is based on those interviews. So first of all, how do we know what air pollution is? We use monitoring stations such as the ones developed by the US EPA to determine the concentrations of pollutants in the atmosphere. Each one of the US EPA monitoring stations costs about $100,000 to $200,000 USD. And this does not even cover the operating costs. At the moment, few African countries have bought and deployed such monitors. There are a lot of scientists who are now conducting measurements in these countries, arguing that there is little data there to make data-driven policies and they want to fill in the gap. They argue that once there is enough data, effective air pollution policies can be developed to mitigate air pollution, just like the US was able to clean up its air.

Now I'm a scientist myself, and I absolutely agree that data is important. But I'm going to argue that data does exist already. It's just not published in international journals and so we don't know about it. For example, I recently conducted a review of air pollution studies in Kenya. And I found that the first study was done in 1983. And back then, just as it is now, vehicular pollution was a major cause of concern for the city. It is truly remarkable that almost 40 years later, nothing has changed. How much more data do we need to tackle air pollution in Nairobi, is something that I think about a lot.

So the data exists, but the data is not being collected by the highly precise instruments that are considered the gold standard by air pollution scientists. The science done in the US which is published in international journals, and is considered cutting edge, relies on these instruments and the decades worth of data that has already been collected. The sparse monitors in the global south operate for shorter timescales because of the operating costs. These studies are therefore… they therefore become local, or fragmentary, and the insights that these measurements can potentially provide are diminished. This needs to be recognized to re-center Kenyan air pollution science and allow it to speak for itself.

Jia-Hui Lee: I really love what you just said, because I think that really captures the experiences that I've had with my own research in Tanzania. So when I did some research on how pest management was handled in the 80s, there was a lot of questions of which poisons to use, what kinds of traps… The development officers were thinking aloud, what was the best way to handle the pest situation that was threatening food supply and harvest in Tanzania. And what they did not realize at the time, which is research that’s now coming out from African-led Tanzanian-led researchers is that farmers had all along known that there were plants that people could use as a deterrent, to deter rats and other kinds of small mammals from destroying your crops. And so this is exactly what you were saying - that the data is there. But somehow the structures of knowledge that we have today continue to marginalize these kinds of knowledges. And I'm interested to know, given all of these challenges, can you say a little bit about how the scientists you've interviewed, how do they in their own work decolonize air pollution science?

Priyanka deSouza: Thank you Jia-Hui. The examples that you've provided from your own work are so telling and it's really incredible to see how much this resonates across fields, for all knowledges produced in Africa. So, in the context of air pollution, it's pretty fantastic because African scientists have not been sitting back. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa launched the Clean Air Journal, which provides a space for African scientists to publish measurements which might not be considered cutting edge enough for, say, a US journal. Rebecca Garland at the center is now one of the scientists running the journal and she's been really instrumental in trying to organize African air pollution scientists into a network to come together and shape a research agenda for air pollution for the continent.

Scientists in other parts of the world such as India - and here I have to mention Pallavi Pant - have organized Facebook and Twitter groups to connect scientists working on air pollution science in the same place, so that the work done by different groups can speak to each other and complement each other instead of drowning each other out. Moreover, these groups create learning opportunities for scientists. Scientists from elsewhere who have access to funding opportunities can work as equals with scientists from the Global South, who have immense local knowledge but do not have access to these funding opportunities.

Jia-Hui Lee: I'm wondering if we can hear from Pallavi about her research.

Emmett McKinney: Priyanka, Jia-Hui and I caught up with Pallavi to discuss her research in more detail. Here’s an excerpt. You can listen to the full conversation on our next episode.

Pallavi Pant: My work was primarily focused on understanding PM2.5, which is really small particulate matter. It's in the air all around us. My goal was to study what the levels are in Delhi and how different sources are contributing to the levels of PM2.5 we see in the city.

But at different conferences and in meetings, as I met researchers and PhD students, early career researchers from India, I realized that a lot of them weren't quite familiar with the literature on air pollution in the country. They hadn't always seen the studies that had been published. They weren't keeping up with what the policy developments in Delhi and in India were, and how that sort of all made sense. And that was the origin for the 'Air Quality in India’ platform that I have been running.

I started the platform in 2013. I finished my PhD in 2014, just for reference, and at that point, my only goal was to find a way to bring together young researchers who were either from India or working on India's air pollution, and make sure that they can access the information that is out there and try and find ways to make it a collaborative process where we could all learn from each other.

[music]

There can be a really good middle ground that international scientists and scientists from within India can work at, where they're trying to both improve science for the sake of science, and helping us understand the processes and systems. But then contextualizing it and making sure that those results are important and useful in making policies and improving the quality of air that all Indians are breathing.

Jia-Hui Lee: So [Priyanka], you've mentioned funding. And that's one of the biggest issues, I think, when it comes to questions of decolonizing science. So what has been happening, because the study of rodents or rodent science isn’t a field that gets a lot of traction, whether it’s global health, or epidemiology, or animal behavior. And so what happens is the scientists I've spoken with who work on rodents, whether it's rodent-borne diseases or pest management, they tell me that a lot of funding priorities do not actually fund their work. It goes to fund really headline-grabbing infectious diseases like malaria, for example, or HIV AIDS, which are really important research areas that should be focused on, but I think what happens is that a lot of the funding gets funneled to these areas and then these scientists find that their own work is not very well supported. But one of the other things that a lot of these scientists have been saying to me is that we need to find local solutions for local problems. So, regardless of the funding challenges, there are ways in which they're coming up with very ingenious ideas and methodologies to try and circumnavigate this funding issue.

Priyanka deSouza: I've definitely seen the same in air pollution in Kenya. It's not just scientists, it's also citizen scientists and the lay public who are entering this space with locally-made devices to measure air pollution. And they are using this data to try and insert their voices into the global narrative about air pollution to make their experiences count and be taken seriously.

Jia-Hui Lee: Yeah, that's so important because when we talk about science, we tend to assume it's only the scientists who do science, but really science can be done by all kinds of people. And that's part of, again, the question or discussion around decolonizing science – it’s how do non-scientists also participate in the production and the use of scientific knowledge?

I was wondering, Priyanka, if you can tell us about the deCOALonize movement that really started in Lamu in Kenya, around issues of the environment but also the air pollution.

Priyanka deSouza: Thank you for asking. It's just incredible to me what this coalition of organizers have managed to achieve in Lamu. DeCOALonize started to prevent the establishment of a coal plant in Lamu, Kenya. The economics of the plant was way off to begin with. The community in Lamu, which is a beautiful island in the northwestern province of Kenya, rose up against the plant, arguing that it would damage their homes, [and] endanger their livelihoods. And the campaign really caught fire. A coalition of organizers from Nairobi and other parts of Kenya joined hands with the community in Lamu to stop the plant. Through a mix of organizing in and out of court, as well as running an amazing divestment campaign to prevent, at that point, the African Development Bank was really thinking about providing financing for the plant. This divestment campaign actually prevented them from moving forward with those plans. And so through this organizing, through the divestment campaign, the campaign won an unprecedented victory in court.

The Kenya National Environmental Tribunal ruled that the plant construction was to be stayed because of a faulty environmental impact assessment. And guess what? Air quality was one of the concerns that the court ruled had not been considered in drafting this environmental impact assessment. Note that the major concern the court had was really that NEMA, the National Environment Management Authority, which was supposed to conduct this impact assessment had not included the community, the voices of the community that lived near the plant. And because NEMA had not reached out to this community and ensured that proper public participation happened, the court ruled that the plant would have to be stayed. Would the court have issued this verdict without the organizing of the community? I think not. Other major construction projects in Kenya have happened. Even though in those cases the environmental impact assessments were just as weak. And therefore, the key point I want to make here is that science matters. However, the context in which science operates also matters. And the community were able to recognize that this was a place in which the science would be an important tool for them to use to stay the plant and it contributed to the court victory.

Jia-Hui Lee: I think what you've really pointed out there is not that just science matters, but the people who are producing the science, using the science, and using the science to do certain things, is really the heart of thinking about decolonizing. So decolonizing isn't just a matter of making sure that there are knowledges from all different parts of the world in what a scientific corpus might look like, but it's also about people feeling empowered to be part of the process of producing that knowledge.

Priyanka deSouza: Absolutely. And Jia-Hui, now bringing the conversation home, would you mind speaking a little about what all this means for us at MIT?

Jia-Hui Lee: So this is something I've always been thinking about especially, on the one hand as a graduate student who's writing my dissertation, but also on the other as somebody who teaches at MIT as a teaching assistant. And one of the questions that I like to ask my students in classes that are more social science-based but the students are from engineering backgrounds, computer science backgrounds, and they are going to go for it to produce scientific knowledge, I like to ask these students, what is your science going to be used for? And I think for them to start thinking about that question - what is your science used for - is the beginning of a conversation about decolonizing these power structures that shape science.

Priyanka deSouza: That was just beautifully said Jia-Hui. It was a pleasure speaking to you today.

Jia-Hui Lee: Likewise.

Emmett McKinney: And a pleasure sitting here to listen as well. I think we spend a lot of time sort of assuming that knowledge comes out of nowhere - that it just exists and it's something that we can read and learn from, but I think as many scholars throughout the urban planning sphere and, of course, as many other have identified, it’s people who are out there gathering the data, and it's also people who are interpreting it, writing about it and surely it's people who are acting on it. So Jia-Hui, Priyanka, I really appreciate you taking time to help lay this out for us today. And I know I sure learned a lot and I hope our listeners did too.

Jia-Hui Lee: Thank you.

Priyanka deSouza: Thanks Emmett.

[This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. For more information about ongoing research, see works by Kenyan air pollution scientists Professor Michael Gatari (University of Nairobi), Andriannah Mbandi (Stockholm Environment Institute), and Kanyiva Muindi (African Population & Health Research Center).

This has been CoLab Radio – a production of the MIT Community Innovators Lab. We appreciate you taking some time to listen – and want to remind you: this podcast is for you. We want to not only tell the stories that we see, but uncover the ones we don’t. If you have a story to tell – let us know by sending us a message at colabcom@mit.edu. And stay tuned, as there is more to come. 

About the speakers:

Priyanka deSouza is a PhD researcher at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) in the Senseable City Lab. Priyanka studies air pollution from both a scientific and urban planning perspective, with a focus on East Africa.

Jia-Hui Lee is a PhD researcher in the MIT History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) program. Jia-Hui’s work focuses on scientific research in pest management in Tanzania, specifically on human-rodent encounters.

Emmett McKinney is a Producer for CoLab Radio, where he works to amplify community narratives. As a Master in City Planning student (2020), Emmett works to ground policies aimed “sustainability” and “resilience” in communities’ lived experiences. His current research focuses on transportation and water infrastructure, and how equity and justice are integrated into data-driven planning. Outside of CoLab, Emmett can be found running, drinking coffee, and dancing to reggaeton.