Our first interview!

From physical, through digital, to theoretical

This week we bring you our first ever interview! We interviewed Dr Kayla Schulte and Dr Andrew Grieve (who we know from their amazing work with Breathe London) about their expectations for next week’s conference “Communicating Air Quality: Physical, Digital, and Theoretical Advances”. This is a British Academy / Wellcome Trust conference and Louise for one can’t wait!

What are your hopes for the conference?

Kayla: My great hope is that people from all disciplines will have their conceptions challenged. I want to hear “oh, that feels uncomfortable”. I want them to engage in reflexivity and openness, to ask themselves “am I missing something, perhaps I can ponder further”.

Andrew: I’m used to going to conferences in a standard format where people present their projects and discuss the results. This time it’s more of a discussion - there is no answer. We are framing it as a fertile area for discussion. This is the first of its kind and we hope everyone feels they have something to contribute. We want it to be inclusive and discursive.

Why did you choose to focus the conference on communicating air quality?

Andrew: It’s what our work is about; it’s a discipline. There is always something to learn from people doing it in different ways. We hope this isn’t the last - we want to keep everyone connected after the conference.

Kasia Molga, Human Sensor LDN, 2018. Credit: Angela Dennis, courtesy of Invisible Dust 2-1.

Kayla: We have dedicated our careers to communication of air quality information. That's our calling. We both approach it from different disciplines and interests. I come from a social theory research background and have always been interested in bringing my work into conversation with the natural sciences. Engaging with in human geography and other social research domains helps to expand discussions around how we measure, understand and communicate the natural world.

What did you hope that partnering with the British Academy would bring?

Kayla: British Academy is a strong intellectual space. We hope it will spark new conversations, across disciplines.

Andrew: Work on air quality has typically been in the area of natural sciences. You run a monitor and put the results on a webpage. But air quality work is evolving. It’s important we think about who else exists in this space - it’s not just for scientists.

What methods have proven most effective in communicating air quality, especially to those without a scientific background?

Kayla: It totally depends on the groups and the audiences. Some principles are always true - you need patience, humility and listening when communicating. It’s normal to provide lists of actions that people can take and point to data, but it’s fundamentally important to understand lived experience. My work is fundamentally participatory, and I believe it’s important to move away from uni-directional communication. We need to collapse hierarchies: not make people feel less than others.

How can we combat environmental misinformation in a world where people primarily get their information from social media and online sources?

Kayla: We anticipate this will be a hot topic at the conference. There is a lot to unpack just within the term “misinformation”. For example there is a lot of discussion of denialism at the moment. We are in an information-rich age and the way we come to and process information is changing. This is what we’re observing with misinformation. We also identify differences in values - people may prioritise some information over other, some may be drawn to information on economic stability. There are some obvious examples of trying to discredit scientific facts. But there is a more murky space of how people process information and how they are introduced to it.

Top journalism on a Wednesday afternoon!

Andrew: Academics working on air pollution haven’t been attacked in way those in climate change have. We had a taste of it with ULEZ. This is another reason that this conference is important. Arguably we have been a bunch of scientists who just think their data will be believed, but there are all sorts of actors in between.

What are some of the most common misconceptions about air pollution, and how can clear communication help debunk these myths?

Andrew: People often think either it’s all fine or it’s all terrible. This speaks to personal experience and whether you are caring for someone. People also tend to believe that air pollution is the same all the time. Actually it changes drastically - hour to hour, day to day.

Kayla: There is a belief that if you feel the effect of air pollution but the monitor doesn’t show it, then it does not exist. The body is the original sensor, and should be respected as such. Harm is and has been done in environmental justice contexts when only narrow, scientific forms of air pollution data are considered credible.

Andrew: In the air quality community, we have tended to focus on real-time communications but haven’t put as much into longer-term effects of pollution on health. We don’t even have a standard long-term index in the UK.

If you had absolute creative control and could create a challenge, a TikTok dance, hashtag, or anything that would go viral to explain the key things about air quality, what would you create?

Andrew: I was involved in a youth theatre production for a Camden theatre many years ago. I have been trying to get teenagers involved in conversations about air pollution ever since. It was led by teenagers - their perspectives on growing up in a city and their thoughts and aspirations for the future were powerful. I would love to see teenagers have a creative space to explore this more.

Kayla: I’d like to see people with a high-profile following - athletes, influencers - to achieve more global funding to help cut off pollution at source and protect human and ecosystem health. We need to be ambitious - we are dealing with tough systemic stuff here.

What should those attending be mulling over before next Thursday?

Kayla: We want attendees to think about their top examples of air quality communications and why, and what are the biggest challenges. They should mentally prepare themselves to be self-reflexive and open.

Andrew: One of our speakers, Agnes, talks about meeting people where they are. Everyone should join the conference with that in mind.

Final note

Andrew flagged that the review of the Air Quality Information System was published today. Lots to mull over before the conference next week. We haven’t had time to review but we will bring you more in future blogs!

Thank you to Andrew and Kayla for taking the time to talk about their plans for the conference - can’t wait, and we’ll report back after the conference!