Abstract
A series of recent studies has introduced the concept of “environmental ascription” (Legot et al. 2010a; Lucier et al. 2011; Rosofsky et al. 2013; Scharber et al. 2013). It is well known that children from marginalized racial and economic communities face diminished life chances, partly due to a lack of adequate educational opportunity. It is also well documented in the environmental injustice literature (see below) that these same communities carry a disproportionate burden of industrial pollution. Environmental ascription makes a connection between these two findings to argue that, along with race, class, and gender, place should be considered an additional and overlapping ascriptive force in the sense that it exerts a limiting effect on children’s future life chances by harming their health and, in turn, hindering their school performance. The first study in this series (Legot et al. 2010a) was a simple, descriptive documentation of the problem of environmental ascription. Subsequent studies sought to specify the consequences of environmental ascription, including studies of the relationship between race and class, proximity to toxics, and (a) selected childhood illnesses (Legot et al. 2011) and (b) school performance scores (Lucier et al. 2011; Rosofsky et al. 2013; Scharber et al. 2013). Like much of the earlier sociological research on environmental injustice (cf. Bullard et al. (2007), these studies have focused in the United States (USA) overall as well as specific cities within the USA. This chapter will first provide an overview of the quantitative research on environmental injustice in the USA, as well as the existing research on the effects of toxic chemicals on child development (specifically as it relates to academic achievement). Then, the chapter will summarize existing research that connects evidence of environmental injustice with evidence of the effects of toxic pollution on school performance, which provides evidence for the existence of an environmental dimension of ascription.
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London, B., Lucier, C., Rosofsky, A., Scharber, H. (2016). Environmental Ascription: Industrial Pollution, Place, and Children’s Health and Learning in the USA. In: Ansell, N., Klocker, N., Skelton, T. (eds) Geographies of Global Issues: Change and Threat. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-54-5_14
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