The politics and science of health and disease remain contested terrain among scientists, health practitioners, policy makers, industry, communities, and the public. Stakeholders in disputes about illnesses or conditions disagree over their fundamental causes as well as how they should be treated and prevented. This thought-provoking book crosses disciplinary boundaries by engaging with both public health policy and social science, asserting that science, activism, and policy are not separate issues and showing how the contribution of environmental factors in disease is often overlooked.

Introduction : environmental justice and contested illnesses / Rachel Morello-Frosch, Phil Brown, and Stephen Zavestoski -- Embodied health movements / Phil Brown ... [et al.] -- Qualitative approaches in environmental health research / Phil Brown -- Getting into the field: new approaches to research methods / Phil Brown, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Stephen Zavestoski -- Environmental justice and the precautionary principle : air toxics exposures and health risks among schoolchildren in Los Angeles / Rachel Morello-Frosch, Manuel Pastor, and James Sadd -- A narrowing gulf of difference? disputes and discoveries in the study of Gulf War related illnesses / Phil Brown ... [et al.] -- The health politics of asthma : environmental justice and collective illness experience / Phil Brown ... [et al.] -- Pollution comes home and gets personal : women's experience of household chemical exposure / Rebecca Gasior Altman ... [et al.] -- The personal is scientific, the scientific is political : the public paradigm of the environmental breast cancer movement / Sabrina McCormick ... [et al.] -- School custodians and green cleaners : labor-environmental coalitions and toxics reduction / Laura Senier ... [et al.] -- Labor-environmental coalition formation : framing and the right to know / Brian Mayer, Phil Brown, and Rachel Morello-Frosch -- The brown superfund research program : a multistakeholder partnership addresses problems in contaminated communities / Laura Senier ... [et al.] -- Toxic ignorance and the right to know : biomonitoring results communication; a survey of scientists and study participants / Rachel Morello-Frosch ... [et al.] -- IRB challenges in community-based participatory research on human exposure to environmental toxics : a case study / Phil Brown ... [et al.].