Environmental Data Justice Futures: Remaking the Right to Know to Center Collective Care and Good Relations in North America

This thematic collection of Science, Technology, & Human Values titled “Environmental Data Justice Futures” examines how environmental data justice (EDJ) centers and contextualizes data practices to move beyond the good/bad data binary. As a framework, EDJ is rooted in community-based research and praxis, and emerges from the North American Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, drawing on both environmental justice and data justice movements. While EDJ's intellectual roots highlight critiques of regulatory systems and the production of ignorance, its movement toward feminist and Indigenous worldviews guides data practices outside these systems. These articles highlight key themes for EDJ: how communities enact epistemic agency through both acceptance and refusal of research; how practitioners can retool flawed government data with care; and how communities can shift the burdens of proof and obligations to know to those who benefit from disproportionate exposure. Throughout, EDJ is engaged as a living practice that actively reconfigures what counts as data and how it can inform alternative infrastructures. This collection reflects the diversity of approaches and commitments as EDJ continuously transforms through reflexive practices, rather than offering a singular model.