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Residents of Love Canal, in the Niagara Falls region of Western New York, were alerted to signs of a toxic waste crisis involving the lethal chemical byproduct dioxin in the late 1970s. Residents learned about the crisis through news media, community activism and research, and their own visceral experiences – they could smell noxious fumes, noticed black sludge seeping into their basements, and saw children falling ill. Activists and academics carried out community-based research to survey the area in an effort to understand the extent of the hazard and its effects – data that they saw as missing, at the time – in turn generating evidence of changes in health and pregnancy abnormalities. In doing so, members of the community aimed to hold corporate and government stakeholders accountable to evacuate residents, organize remediation, and strengthen scientific studies and interventions to care for residents. Regional health authorities, however, dismissed community-based studies as “useless housewife data”. Activists responded by scrutinizing government and scientific studies, critiquing a lack of ecological validity and trustworthiness. Residents and community groups’ advocacy contributed to their exercise of epistemic authority, the creation of archival records and initiatives tracking the crisis over the last five decades, and wider public attention to Love Canal and other sites like it.

Image Description and Source: "Map showing distribution of symptoms believed to be caused by Love Canal pollutants," Digital Collections - University at Buffalo Libraries, May 1982.

Shankar, Saguna. 2023. "What's the Use of Data? Epistemic Authority and Environmental Injustice at Love Canal." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali. Kim Fortun, Phillio Baum and Prerna Srigyvan. Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaiti, Nov 8-11.

In Louisiana, governing elites have long found it more profitable to deny the connections between health outcomes and the structural inequities of an anti-Black petrostate. Their denial is made possible by the existence of data divergence–that is, inconsistencies between data sets or between a data set and the realities it purports to represent (Encyclopedia of Social Measurement 2005). These inconsistencies range from missing or “undone” (i.e. incomplete or ignored) data (Frickel et al. 2007) to the production of different measures (and the selection of different priorities) by institutional silos. Recognition of the need for public health capacities that address the systems and structures impacting health–especially children’s health–has motivated health equity advocates in Louisiana to fill the data gaps through collaborative datawork, that is, the work of making data meaningful across social and scientific communities. In 2022, a coalition of community organizations, academic researchers, and public health workers led by the Louisiana Center for Health Equity (LCHE), a community-based organization created by a registered nurse, worked together to examine the links between adolescent mental health and disciplinary practices in schools. Ensuring their agendas were informed by community priorities led them to incorporate the contributions of adolescents advocating for better access to physical and mental healthcare resources and the abolishment of discriminatory and punitive disciplinary actions in schools. Their collaborative datawork revealed how data gaps around adolescent mental health are a structuring component of schools’ discriminatory and punitive climates–much as gaps in environmental health data benefit polluting industries. They found that existing figures around adolescent mental health are inaccurate, as many youth are unable to receive an official diagnosis owing to lack of healthcare access. LCHE advocates at a house committee meeting in January 2023 reported that students who exhibit behavioral issues rooted in trauma or mental health more often receive punitive disciplinary actions rather than rehabilitative and restorative services. This work generated the support needed to pass legislation to expand public health infrastructure and access to mental health resources. In June 2023, House Bill 353 authorized the allotment of "mental health days" as an excused absence for students; introduced procedures for schools to connect students to medical treatment and services; and required the Louisiana Department of Education to develop and administer a pilot program for implementing mental health screening, among other changes. By mobilizing advocates and scholars from across the social and institutional silos, LCHE’s collaborative datawork tentatively expanded children’s public health infrastructures. 

Fisher, Margaux. 2023. "Collaborative Datawork and Reframing Adolescent Mental Health in the Deep South." 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.

“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. 

The "impact" of EJ studies when linked to advocacy

"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."

Larger questions behind EJ struggles

"While “environmental justice” emerged as a concept in the United States in the 1980s, it addresses enduring global questions that long predate contemporary environmentalism. How should humans share the benefits and burdens of nature fairly among our contemporaries and with generations to come? In doing so, what are our obligations to the land, air, water, other species, and to the divine? Who should make such important decisions and how?"

EJ as a concept in global comparison

"Even if the term “environmental justice” is not as widely used outside the U.S., it has become a global concern, albeit one that is articulated differently around the world (Agyeman, Cole, Haluza-DeLay, & 9 O’Riley, 2009: Baehler, 2017; Walker & Bulkeley, 2006). 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).

Civic Experts

"Karvonen and Brand (2014) describe four additional models of expertise relevant to sustainability that arose in recent decades, which can foster greater trust between EJ communities and experts. Foremost is the civic expert, who understands the need to enrich technical understanding with other forms of knowledge (including local, experiential, tacit, and indigenous understandings), and to share power over choices with the public, to arrive at better informed and more socially acceptable decisions (see also Stilgoe, Irwin, & Jones, 2006). These experts are adept at organizing authentic public participation in environmental (John, 1994; Shutkin, 2000), scientific (Jasanoff, 2011), and technological (Sclove, 1995) policy making and projects. Civic experts may be assisted by outreach experts, who provide technical and scientific information that can help boost communities’ capacities to participate in EJ decisions. Multidisciplinary experts may help by fostering collaboration among experts from different fields to tackle complex problems, and meta-experts may broker novel solutions that emerge and help ensure they are implemented in policy or practice. Within each of these models academics may play a range of roles in any given research project, such as planner, leader, catalyst, facilitator, teacher, designer, listener, observer, synthesizer, and reporter (O’Brien, 2001; Huntjens et al., 2014)."

Minimalist participatory approaches & ethnography

"At present, examples of the least participatory approaches that can still meet the definition of ES include research on communicating risks effectively and enhancing public understanding of science, when they involve tailoring information to communities based on surveys, focus groups, and other means of gauging their interests and needs. Ethnography can promote fuller participation by amplifying community members’ voices in scholarship and conducting “member checks” with participants to test researchers’ understandings against community interpretations (although researchers exert final control over analysis)."

Big Data and EJ research key points

While big data offer new possibilities for environmental justice research, they also present problems of voice, speed, and expertise (Mah, 2017). First, much institutionally-gathered big data is proprietary and inaccessible to community members and researchers, and unrepresentative of marginalized populations. Researchers need to consider how to practice transparency, given that many of these data are collected not by researchers but by third parties, with minimal or no approval from data subjects, who have little control over how these data are used and interpreted to make decisions that affect subjects. Second, there is the problem of speed. 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. Third, because big data are complex and challenging to analyze well, and can present novel problems of reliability (such as depending on anonymous contributors of crowdsourced data), they require considerable expertise to interpret. 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 by working with communities to consider how these data are gathered, demystifying how algorithms analyze data, and so on (D’Ignazio & Bhargava, 2015)."