Blair Allen

About

Blair Allen is an Assistant Director of IT, Applications & Data Services at Virginia Tech, located at 880 West Campus Drive in Blacksburg, VA. He joined Virginia Tech in 2000 with the goal of earning a bachelor's degree in both Computer Engineering and Computer Science, driven by his interest in hardware and software aspects of computers. During his undergraduate studies, he worked as a student-wage employee in the IT Support department at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, also on the Blacksburg campus. Over the years, his role expanded to include more responsibilities and advanced IT projects, and in 2010, he became a full-time employee handling complex IT projects for the Information Systems group at the veterinary college. Later that year, he transitioned to web application development, a personal passion since high school, contributing to the development of the college's intranet web application that provides access to sensitive data, forms, and tools used by the veterinary college and hospital. In 2016, Blair transferred to the Pamplin College of Business to serve as a Systems Developer in the Office of Information Technology, where he has taken over desktop and web application development duties, working to enhance the college's business systems using industry-standard technologies and practices. Outside of his professional work, Blair enjoys supporting Virginia Tech athletics, especially football and men's basketball, and is passionate about the…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Environmental health
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Medicine
• Environmental science
• Archaeology
• Nursing
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Strongly Participatory Science and Knowledge Justice in an Environmentally Contested Region

  Science Technology & Human Values · 2018-02-14 · 101 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article draws insights from a case study examining unanswered health questions of residents in two polluted towns in an industrial region in southern France. A participatory health study, as conducted by the author, is presented as a way to address undone science by providing the residents with relevant data supporting their illness claims. Local residents were included in the health survey process, from the formulation of the questions to the final data analysis. Through this strongly part…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toxic truths

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2020 · 50 citations

  Political strategies for seeking environmental justice Introduction to Part III -Alice Mah 8 Legitimating confrontational discourses by local environmental groups: The case of air quality monitoring in a Spanish industrial area -Miguel A.

  DOI

• Through a maze of studies: health questions and ‘undone science’ in a French industrial region

  Environmental Sociology · 2016-10-08 · 48 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Near the city of Marseille is one of France’s largest industrial regions, home to over 400 industrial facilities. Adjacent to these facilities are towns whose residents have complained of myriad health problems, from respiratory illness and autoimmune disease to cancers. While human environmental health in this region has been studied repeatedly by state agencies and allied organizations, the studies focused on tightly constructed questions answerable within particular languages of expertise. Th…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Knowledge Justice: An Opportunity for Counter-expertise in Security vs. Science Debates

  Science as Culture · 2017-06-21 · 26 citations

  articleSenior author

  Knowledge justice provides a conceptual framework to apply principles of social justice in environments of competing interests regarding science. Both knowledge and its making can be seen as a good to be distributed, including all voices for whom the science will matter. In this framework, knowledge production is shared among a broader constituency of knowers representing both local and cosmopolitan voices. The problem of knowledge injustice can be seen in the U.S. government’s recent attempt to…

  PublisherDOI

• Katrina’s Contamination: Regulatory Knowledge Gaps in the Making and Unmaking of Environmental Contention

  2013-09-13 · 18 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Hurricane Katrina quickly became iconic among environmental and social justice scholars and activists for its revelatory images and immediate uncovering of racial disparities in the US. The storm, the flood and the incompetent response by government agencies have become a part of our collective memory. By far the largest recipients of these failures have been the poor and minority residents of New Orleans driven out of their homes in record numbers. The initial US government failures of the Fede…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Chemical Communities: Explaining Variation in Citizen Effects on Policy-Relevant Science and Industrial Transformation in Three Nations

  NSF · $148k · 2012–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Alison K. Cohen

  University of California, San Francisco

  16 shared

• Johanna Lees

  9 shared

• Maxime Jeanjean

  7 shared

• Yolaine Ferrier

  7 shared

• Miranda P. Dotson

  Northeastern University

  6 shared

• Deborah R. Campbell

  University of South Florida

  2 shared

• Marine Périot

  2 shared

• T Richards

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Science and Technology Studies

  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

  1999

• MS, Architectural Technology

  Columbia University

  1977

• BS, Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering

  University of Colorado Boulder

  1976

Similar researchers at Virginia Tech

• Doug Andersonh-31
• Idris Adjeridh-16
• Lori Andersonh-12