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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.

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. 

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. 

I have many questions, but to start: 

I’d like to build perspective on the types of social science research being done on COVID-19 in different settings, reading through the research agendas collected by CONVERGE, for example, abstracts of NSF RAPID awards in the social sciences, and the short articles published by the Social Science Research Council.   It will be a challenge just to build a collection of lists like these to (slowly) work through.  I see this as a way to understand the discursive formations emerging around COVID-19, giving us a sense of gaps, risks and issues that especially need attention by STS researchers.