Infrastructuring Care: Co-Designing Computational Notebooks for Environmental Data Justice

The 2016 election of Donald Trump heightened the disproportionate risks from toxicants faced by minoritized communities from cuts in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding, reworking environmental health regulations, and obfuscating related information. In response, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)—a US-based network of social scientists, technologists, and activists—was formed to develop an environmental data justice framework to address the ongoing political forces that influence how environmental data is collected, shared, and rendered flawed, incomplete, or vulnerable. By collaborating with communities and non-profit organizations, EDGI's Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW) project designed computational notebooks that critically situate, question, and analyze EPA datasets on industry compliance and state enforcement of environmental regulations beyond the Trump political moment. These civic partnerships expose gaps, biases, and silences in environmental data that sustain a harmful permission-to-pollute system. Using a multi-sited auto-technography, we reflect on the development and use of EEW notebooks, tracing their application across workshops, collectively designed reports, and data stewardship practices. We show how feminist care practices informed the creation of computational notebooks as an effective resource for environmental justice groups to negotiate environmental datafication, supporting the co-production of critical knowledge about environmental governance.