Exposing Environmental Health Deception as a Government Whistleblower: Turning Critical Ethnography into Public Pedagogy

Abstract

This article focuses on the author's applied anthropological work with the Ingham County Health Department between 1998 and 2001. Government administrators were reflexively aware that nobody had ever stepped back to assess the area's overall environmental health and rank the issues according to some criteria, such as by the ‘most urgent problems’, and then help resolve them. They requested a holistic analysis. The author, an anthropologist, was hired to investigate virtually all of the environmental health problems in the region. This initiative, as originally conceived, was envisioned as a challenge to traditional ways of doing business at the Environmental Health Bureau of the Health Department. The Health Department leadership explicitly sought to create a model that turned the ‘public's health into the ‘People's Health’. Paradoxically, after several disturbing findings became apparent, Health Department officials began to work diligently to prevent the impending publication of the first report, ‘The Story of Water Resources at Work’ in August 2000. The article describes how the author used the methodology of critical ethnography to chronicle the processes of hegemony in the work environment, and how he acted as a critical public pedagogue by employing extant cultural forms to communicate these corruptions to citizens at large. In so doing it charts the surprising contingencies that resulted from his resistance.