Community interviews have found that many household have members that are gardeners. Research has shown that garndening labor is especially socially vulnerable and hard to protect through organizing. See: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M5_McMmsbcb_s2Qn17XtnFQ3HBeC2hcfYSBYrqmDB-0/edit?usp=sharing . Also see Sal Zarate's work: https://www.zotero.org/groups/130725/disastersts/collections/ICRQQ8PM
MPNA-GREEN's Community Research Board is conducting community interviews and learned that there are professional gardeners in many households, which likely comes with significant exposre to pesticides, likely brining them home to their families. See, for example, this recent study: https://www.ehn.org/glyphosate-childrens-health-2659484037.html, and there is always worries about endocrine disrupting chemicals in ag work.
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!
Homeless shelter and support center: https://www.ocregister.com/2022/07/22/motorcycle-club-brings-hope-and-harleys-to-homeless-shelter.
Is this center considered an asset by residents, or -- as in many places -- did they contest its presence in Santa Ana given so many other stresses there?
I would like to host part of a call to help those interested in working on a rapid COVID-19 Community Case Study in their area, then later host another call to share results.
I’ll teach with the COVID Community Case Study Assignment in a fall lower division undergraduate class, “Environmental Injustice.”
I’ll work with Tim Schütz to build a Zotero bibliography and digital collection of research, news and commentary focused on connections between COVID-19 and environmental injustice -- for use in fall teaching (in a lower division undergraduate class, “Environmental Injustice”). This will support the COVID Community Case Study Assignment in the COVID-19 Ethnographic Portfolio Project.
I’ll also work with Tim to build a digital collection focused on COVID-19 in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana (USA), a COVID-19 and environmental injustice hotspot. This collection will contribute to our set of place essays. It also will be part of a digital tour of St. John the Baptist Parish that we are designing for students, collaborating with the Whitney Plantation, a rare (if not singular) plantation museum focused on and honoring the lives of enslaved people. The chemical plants in St. John the Baptist Parish were built on the foundation of sugar plantations. We hope to build a powerful case demonstrating both compound vulnerabilities and ways racism and injustice are historically produced.
I’m part of the “Higher Education, Grief, and Loss in COVID-19” Working Group associated with the Hazard Research Center’s CONVERGE project. The goal is to bring critical insights from scholarship on loss, grief and collective recovery in varied setting into our highed classrooms. The group is still working out its way of working, with plans to start by building a shared bibliography.