Privilege and responsibility in environmental justice research

Ground Truths: Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice

“…Another important challenge of writing about EJ is to find a balance between evoking appropriate outrage and inspiring careful analysis (Lockie 2018). Writing the book during the COVID-19 pandemic and during the widespread reckoning with anti-Black police violence in the U.S. was a constant reminder of how environmental injustices wreak violence on people's bodies, minds, and communities.…”

“…Researchers have turned to community-engaged approaches because they make unique contributions to the quality of EJ research by strengthening its relevance, rigor, and reach , as well as its reflexivity (Lockie 2018;Raphael 2019a;Hale 2008).…”

“…Researchers and community partners cannot avoid addressing their differences of power and privilege (Muhammad et al 2017). When collaborators bridge their diverse perspectives, assumptions, and experiences, they can generate richer and less distorted knowledge about EJ communities than expert-driven studies do (Lockie 2018). This depends on continuous interaction at each stage of the research, not simply sensitizing researchers to different points of view at the start.…”

Challenging the white spaces of environmental sociology

“…In our early committee work, we sometimes heard from white sociologists that U.S. environmental sociology is 'already doing this work' because of the growing presence of environmental justice scholarship, with the further implication that other sub-disciplines should look to our example. However, it is important to acknowledge that even within environmental sociology, environmental justice remains firmly on the margins (Bohr and Dunlap 2018;Lockie 2018). Furthermore, given that there has been consistent attention to white supremacy and settler colonialism as they intersect with the environment by Black, Indigenous, and other scholars and activists of color over many decades, we argue that the absence of such perspectives from the dominant canon of environmental sociology, in fact, raises questions regarding erasure and 'colonial unknowing' (Vimalassery, Pegues, and Goldstein 2016) that must be actively named, disrupted and dismantled.…”

“…Specifically, the collection conceptualizes environmental racism and injustice as multi-scalar, centers 'the histories of oppression born within European imperialism and colonization with current forms of exploitation', and recognizes 'Native sovereignty and other unrepresented people's rights' (Ducre 2018, 33). The four articles in the special collection expand on these ideas and address additional calls to center historically marginalized perspectives by integrating insights from critical race theory, Black studies and Indigenous studies into environmental sociology (Bacon 2019;Ducre 2018;Hoover 2018;Lockie 2018;Malin and Ryder 2018;Mascarenhas 2012Mascarenhas , 2020Norgaard 2019;Richter 2018).…”