Jonathan Rosenberg (University of Washington, Seattle)
The Flint Water Study shows that collaborations between communities facing environmental injustice and scientists/engineers are prone to unintentional, mutually-beneficial, exploitation of their non-scientific participants. The non-scientist participant communities are vulnerable, in virtue of past and ongoing social and economic injustices, as well as the ongoing acute environmental crises that those injustices have helped produce. Further, the collaboration between the scientists and non-scientists participants may be unfair, because the benefits of the collaboration do not accrue proportionally to both parties. Thus, despite consent and good will on both sides, these projects may involve the exploitation of their citizen participants.
