I want to continue to support others in their research. I think the ecogov lab is a space to grow as a researcher. I want to continue to be motivated. The ecogov lab has shown me the importance of field notes and why having archiving is important. I hope to make new connections outside of Irvine and continue to connect dots for others.
I hope to build relationships within and beyond the lab, making connections with people who are directly invovled the environmental justice community. I also hope to continue expanding my knowledge about the different frameworks and methodologies the lab uses as well as gain more experience with community-engaged research and apply that to my future career.
I hope to be involved in projects that aim to gather scientific evidence to inform environmental decision making and advocate for greater equity and justice in environmental governance. Through this work, I hope to learn the skills needed to engage in community based research and leverage community knowledge as expert knowledge. In my department, things are often siloed and issues are only seen through one perspective. I really want to gain more experience in collaborating with a wide array of stakeholders to come up with approaches to mitigate the environmental injustices experienced in under-resourced communities.
I am using the lab as a place to test my ideas/skills and understand the variety of ways I can approach problems in the world. I use it as a place to put into practice the things I am learning in my life and hope the lab will continue to give me opportunities to work on real world problems. I also am using the things I learn in the lab to build out a to-do list for my future work and to show me what problems I need to respond to. The lab has and hopefully will continue to help me in creating political strategies.
I want to contribute to and learn from research that is not only focusing on a particular EJ field but is also inherently interdisciplinary. In this way, I hope to expand my experience on different collaborative approaches to EJ research and see projects make a difference in the communities that we are working with. I also hope to learn from listening to more experienced researchers in the Lab and gain an understanding of the process of academic research as a whole. Overall, a research community of passionate, supportive people!
I hope to build and sustain relations of collaboration, understanding, and even friendship. I am using friendship the way Mike Fortun thinks about the concept in his "coming out soon" book.
"Friendship is a volatile conglomeration and an opaquely patterned set of precarious habits and practices that nevertheless still comports us toward openness and attentiveness. Friendship is trying, always."
On a more professional level, I want to be supported in my career development with interdisciplinary research methods and styles that allow me to explore, experiment, and engage with diverse communities and knowledges.
I want to surround myself with people who want to make a difference in the world. I want to learn tools to make my passion for helping others a reality. I want to put public policy and research together and create realistic goals to eliminate policies that put low income residents at a disadvantage.
I hope to create a community of people working on/driven by similar topics, similar goals and ways of seeing the world. For my dissertation project, to connect more to environmental injustice in wilmington and through this lab to also build long term relationships of collaboration and service with environmental groups + others in Southern California (I’m from Southern California but was never as engaged w/social justice here as i was when i lived in new york, something i’m looking to change). To connect with people across all stages of academia, and experience and be reminded of the reasons why i came to grad school. Also as a push to actually present and write/public my research
I am looking to unsettle the way that I think about my work, my methods, my research questions and interests by listening to the thoughts, projects, thinking styles of other researchers. And I hope that my contributions can do a bit of the same for others. As part of that, I am also interested in forming collaborations, finding writing partners, and developing new research activities to get involved in. I am also interested in the lab as an opportunity to improve my ability to communicate my work to different kinds of audiences, with different backgrounds and at different levels of training.
Hopes: (1) collaborative work and the energy and momentum that comes in being accountable to one another; (2) accomplishment - to realize research objectives; to build something by bringing our individual insights and labor to bear on issues that impact communities. To highlight issues that are easily overwhelming to individuals; to create pedagogy that inspires and participates in epistemic justice practices; (3) to publish. My great weakness and desire to write collaboratively with others.