 | Anna Berti Suman MSCA postdoctoral researcher - The European Commission JRC Law, Science and technology studies, Political Science, Sociology |
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03.08.2018-27.09.2018
Sensing the risk: How Citizen Sensing may transform the governance environmental risk to public health
Anna Berti Suman is a PhD researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society. Her PhD project aims at investigating how Citizen Sensing, grassroots-driven monitoring initiatives based on sensor technology, influences the governance of environmental health risk and how the practice can be integrated with institutional models of risk governance through its social and policy uptake. The research thus focuses on how lay people take advantage of sensors and data infrastructures to visualize, monitor, report and combat risks caused by environmental factors to public health. The practice of Citizen Sensing is legitimized on the basis of individual rights: the right to live in a healthy environment and the right to access environmental information, and brings the promise to contribute to a more accountable governance of the risk. The ultimate goal is to verify under which conditions Citizen Sensing can complement the current models of risk governance and which interventions are needed for the practice to be integrated in such models. This complementary potential is assessed by empirically researching the social and policy uptake of Citizen Sensing and its ability to produce the mitigation or even removal of the risk at issue. A number of case studies, e.g. the Safecast Radiations Monitoring case and the AiREAS Air Monitoring case, are inspected, through a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. The case studies are analysed through a theoretical framework built on theories derived from legal, socio-political and STS scholarship on Risk Governance, on the Risk Society, and on Boundary Work, combined with theories on Co-production, Communicative Action and on the role of Non-Expert Knowledge and of Scientific Knowledge in society.
Anna Berti Suman is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and former Dutch Research Council Fellow at the European Commission Joint Research Centre. Through the project "SensJus", Anna is performing research on the potential of civic monitoring as a source of evidence for environmental litigation and as a tool to foster environmental mediation.
Anna obtained her PhD on May 8, 2020. Her PhD project aimed at investigating how Citizen Sensing, grassroots-driven monitoring initiatives based on sensor technology, influences the governance of environmental health risk and how the practice can be integrated with institutional models of risk governance through its social and policy uptake. A booklet containing the key findings for building an integrative framework has been just published by Tilburg University Open Press series and can be freely downloaded here.
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