Amy Kuritzky

Kalamazoo, Michigan’s reputation as “The Paper City” comes at a cost for the predominately Black, low-income residents living near the largest supplier of recycled paperboard in North America. While facing noxious odors and aggravated respiratory illness, they must also endure having their sensory experience of environmental exposure discredited by state evidentiary practices. This project builds from over a year of participant-observation on a team of “community-engaged” scientists seeking to measure and quantify air pollution in support of residents’ lived experiences. Now, I am proposing 12 months of fieldwork in Kalamazoo to ask how the environment comes to matter to residents themselves, and, more broadly, how both scientists and residents contend with and negotiate what counts as evidence. How do residents and local organizations sense and respond to air pollution, and how do they translate these experiences as evidence of exposure? What are the moments in which this place-based evidence comes up against scientific or ‘expert’ frameworks for substantiating exposure, and how do different actors navigate these junctures of overlapping knowledge practices? Leveraging my background on the scientific team, I also seek to theorize and experiment with building knowledge practices that integrate residents’ sensory experiences of smell and scientific data.