Analyze

Remember the arrivals of Mā’ohi ancestors who traversed the sea and surged upon the shores. Over generations, many groups explored and peopled te fenua, travelling around the archipelagos by va’a and on bare foot. Te nūna’a Mā’ohi built up the land, and the land built up te nūna’a, with fare, fa’apū, tumu, marae, and stories. Te fenua and te nūna’a shared experiences and developed knowledges, year in, year out, together. 

In other worlds, those we call popa’āwere knowing and being in very different ways. Over time, te popa’ābuilt physical, spiritual, and epistemic walls to imagine a separation between themselves and the land. They dreamed of knowing without relation, and called it “objectivity.” Adrift in the violent nightmares of their mindless fantasies, te popa’ābecame ungrounded. They tried to fill this existential void through stories of supremacism, which they acted out through projects of transoceanic conquest. In their empty confusion, te popa’ācame to te fenua Mā’ohi with greed, envy, arrogance, disease, and weapons of mass destruction. 

Whether through deliberate genocide or oblivious indifference, popa’āarrivals decimated Mā’ohi communities, as local populations fell by 80% to 90%. This formative trauma foreshadowed disasters to come. Te popa’āstole te fenua’s physical wealth on a massive scale, and then imposed a nuclear weapons testing program, bringing radioactive waste, cancer, and other illness. Te popa’ātimed the introduction of mass tourism with atomic testing, to obscure the social, economic, and environmental impacts of the nuclear program. They deceived ta’ata Mā’ohi with empty stories, progressively luring many ta’ata into a modern nuclear-tourism future of individualism, wage labor, cash economies, consumer advertising, broadcast entertainment, artificial scarcity, and nuclear family subdivisions. Te popa’āsought to break the bond between te ta’ata and te fenua. They did not know, this bond cannot be broken. 

The popa’āproject of supremacist colonial modernization is ongoing. But so is the Mā’ohi project of knowing and growing with the land. 

Tahitian language glossary

fare house(s), building(s)

feafea (i) thinking (of, about)

fenua land(s), territory(ies), world(s)

fa’apū garden(s); place(s) for growing crops

nūna’a people, peoples, nation(s)

Mā’ohi Indigenous to French Polynesia

marae ceremonial pavilion(s)

miti salt water; sea(s)

o of

popa’ā the people who think they are white

te the, a, an, some

ta’ata person, people, human(s)

tumu tree(s); root(s)

va’a canoe(s); sailing canoe(s)

Photo: Maupiti lagoon. Text, photo and layout by Teo Akande Wickland. Made with Mā’ohi, Black American, Latinx, queer, feminist and modern/colonial knowledges.

Wickland, Teo Akande. "Feafea i te miti o te fenua ." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11, 2023

I bring visual and graphic expertise, good organization skills, focus on pedagogical issues;

We need social media skills, organizational skills, community organizing skills, expertise on environmental research; teaching;

“It is difficult to imagine any of these studies exerting as much of an impact on public discourse and policy as they did if they had not been closely connected to litigation, advocacy, and regulatory interest in addressing the emerging issue of environmental justice.” (6)

“EJ scholarship has uncovered environmental and health disparities based not only on race, class, and gender, but also on ethnicity, nationality, indigenous status, immigration and citizenship status, sexual orientation, age, and the intersections among these categories (Nyseth-Brehm & Pellow, 2014; Chakraborty, Collins, & Grineski, 2016; Gaard, 2018). Activists are increasingly appealing to these diverse axes of identity to mobilize broad-based organizing on environmental, healthcare, and immigration policies (Hestres & Nisbet, 2018).” (9)

“In Europe, EJ is often seen as an extension of protections for human rights, including rights of access to environmental information, participation in decision making, and access to the courts, which are enshrined in the United Nations Economic Convention for Europe’s1998 Aarhus Convention (Mason, 2010). In the global South, EJ issues are more often framed as matters of climate justice, participatory and sustainable development and conservation, indigenous and women’s rights, food and energy sovereignty, workplace safety and health, or the environmentalism of the poor (Carmin & Agyeman, 2011; Carruthers, 2008; Martinez-Alier, 2002; Reed & George, 2018; Walker, 2012).” (10)

“The goals of community-engaged scholarship are the generation, exchange and application of mutually beneficial and socially useful knowledge and practices developed through active partnerships between the academy and the community (Engagement Scholarship Consortium, 2018).” (11)

“A more inclusive scholarly process is crucial for strengthening marginalized groups’ rights to access and create knowledge that can help build their power to influence regulation, policy, and institutional practices. ES is scholarship “done with, rather than for or on, a community” (Furco, 2005, p. 10), and this is reason alone to prefer ES to other modes of inquiry into EJ.” (15)

“Ensuring that map making is a democratic process owned and controlled by community members requires that local people, not outside researchers, define the geographic or other boundaries over what counts as part of the “community.””(29)

“EJ research can also ground-truth existing regulatory data that is out-of-date or incomplete, especially emissions data that is reported by industry. In addition, ground-truthing can show how environmental standards for broad geographic areas can fail to protect EJ communities from pollution hot spots that exceed those standards.” (31)

“Data scientists can also use large data sets and algorithms to develop new measures of environmental and social inequities. For example, a team led by researchers at the University of Minnesota recently created a “pollution inequity” metric, which measures the difference between the environmental health damage caused and experienced by a group or individual...” (33)

“While real-time analysis of crowdsourced data can help track the immediate effects of environmental disasters, it may not be as useful for documenting long-term, cumulative toxic exposures typical of many EJ issues. … Much of that expertise is concentrated in corporate, government, and academic institutions, which may be unable or unwilling to collaborate with community-based EJ organizations. EJ researchers could play a valuable role in helping to foster big data literacy…” (33)

“EJ storytelling is a means of gathering testimonial evidence for research and organizing (Evans, 2002). Stories are a grassroots form of making meaning that is often more accessible and immediate in its impacts than academic research, building commitment to collective action (Newman, 2012). Storytelling lends itself to communicating complex causality in a form that can be more memorable than scientific data (Griffiths, 2007).” (34)

In the “Introduction” and “Foundations” sections, the author describes the utility of an “engaged scholarship” approach to academic environmental justice research and outlines several models for engaged scholarship. These models lie along the spectra of the apolitical to the political, and include different types of development, types of engagement, and types of expertise. The author argues in favor of an engaged scholarship approach to EJ as a way to root EJ research in actual EiJ problems and EJ needs. Note that the author defines EJ with the four dimensions of distributive justice, procedural justice, process justice, and restorative/corrective justice.

The sections II. METHODS and III. CHALLENGES AND RESPONSES detail methods and potential pitfalls in engaged scholarship with local communities. Methods can include: investment in easy-to-use and low cost technologies for citizen science uses (e.g., online mapping tools, low cost air quality monitoring devices), using storytelling methods for cultural research and to advance EJ goals, and adequately training and preparing researchers for community collaborations (see Hyde (2017) framework on pg. 38). Pitfalls can include: scholars assuming homogeneity in a community, tensions between community goals and academic goals (e.g., scholarly productivity vs. community education), and limitations imposed  by academic IRBs for collaboration. The author provides several examples of community collaboration focus, with an apparent focus on citizen science/crowdsourced data collection efforts.

• The examples of community and participatory-based work in action can be used to talk about the importance of qualitative data and how to frame people without formal scientific training as experts and engaged researchers. 

• I am curious if theater of the oppressed has been used in STEM and/or environmental education? Found the following

• Liberatory Science Education: Weaving Connections Between Feminist Theory and Science Education

• Challenging Social Exclusion in Computing via 'Theatre of the Oppressed' Pedagogy | Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

• http://www.labtecgc.udesc.br/tabd1/handle/123456789/18315 

• Review of Drama in Science Education

• Raphale’s call for future research along the following lines: systems thinking, investigation into why things work and fail, how aspirations of collaborative projects are met and unmet, how indeterminacy and complexity characterize participatory action and research–are questions that I am interrogating through my research as well. 

• The table on p. 26 on “Levels of Community Participation in Research” naturally raises the question for the reader: Where on this continuum are we? 

• The concise overview of engaged scholarship models: how do they overlap with similar approaches in pedagogy?

• What political developments have shaped engaged scholarship? For example, neoliberal restructuring has appropriated CBPR for market-oriented research and strengthened corporate-humanitarian networks rather than developing community capacities. 

• I want to think more about the idea of the timeline of community-university partnerships: are there benefits to short-term partnerships as well? Do all partnerships need to be sustainable to be mutually beneficial and meaningful?

The author, Chad Raphael, is the Faculty Associate for Sustainability across the Curriculum  at Santa Clara University and Co-Coordinator of the Environmental Justice and the Common Good Initiative. Raphael is considered a prominent scholar in political and environmental communication and has served as a consultant in designing communication campaigns for many environmental organizations. In his position as researcher and professor, Raphael remains committed to integrating his research and teaching by continually co-publishing with undergraduate students. 

“Reflexivity should act as a check on academic anxieties about scholarly identity and status, on professional and disciplinary insularity, and self-regard. Reflexivity reminds us that discipline-building – increasing access to grants, recognition, and seats at the policy table – is a means to larger ends, not an end in itself. It pushes us to worry less about whether we are distinguishing ourselves from other fields and more about whether we are collaborating well with scholars from other disciplines and with community actors to address society’s most significant challenges and imagine their solutions.” (Raphael, p 16)

“The research cited above has begun to document inequities within countries, and between countries in the global North and South, and how they are driven by colonial legacies, corporate exploitation, governmental policies and corruption, intergovernmental agreements and organizations, international foundations, and consumer demand. However, scholars from a handful of countries account for most of this research. Of all scholarly articles published in 2009 with the keyword “environmental justice,” almost half were authored by researchers based in the U.S., 20 percent were written by authors in the U.K., and 60 percent exclusively addressed U.S. cases (Reed & George, 2011). While this distribution in part reflects global scholars’ preference for other terms for EJ issues, it should also alert us to the need to extend the scholarly community beyond dominant Anglo-American academic institutions and to address EJ around the globe.” (Raphael, p 11)

Through this guide, Raphael makes a case for ES within EJ research. Particularly, Raphael articulates the value ES in: 1) building scholarly relevance and promoting restorative justice, 2) improving methodological designs in communication research, 3) reaching a wider pool of audiences in ways that are translatable to the public sphere, and 4) prompting greater reflexivity and collaborations by scholars across disciplines. Evidence is cited from a particular case study wherein a collaboration across academic institutions, independent research institutes, and a statewide advocacy organization led to improvements across the four aforementioned spheres for the research project itself. For example, by co-designing materials to increase the visibility and transparency of specialized research on pollution emissions, this collaboration succeeded in relating knowledge around pollution risks and lent strength to a wider organizing campaign to reduce emissions from the Chevron Oil Refinery in Richmond.