Review: Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis

Ahlness, Ellen A.

doi:10.5070/g314345525

Cited by 10 publications

(23 citation statements)

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“…7 Still, officials and clinicians in the city deflected and negletected their responsibilities, presenting the water quality woes as transient consequences of the water source switch, and residents' emergent health issues as aberrations or casually indeterminate. 8 Mona Hanna-Attisha, a paediatrician in Flint, provides a telling account in her book, What the Eyes Don't See, 9 describing an epidemic of clinical neglect as resident reports of water contamination-related symptomatology began to pour in: "I don't know if I'd ever felt so stunned and disillusioned and sad all at once. What had I done?…”

Section: The Blueprint Of Disaster: Unequal Ecological Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Blueprint Of Disaster: Unequal Ecological Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Abundant media and academic comments on the Flint water crisis have acknowledged the structural and strategic racism and associated environmental injustice in action in the crisis. 8 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 Similarly, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, data are quickly emerging about the gross disparities between historically marginalised populations and their neighbourhoods: people from racial and minority ethnic groups face a heightened risk of exposure to COVID-19 because of social factors rooted in structural inequality and overt discrimination that feed directly into social determinants of health. This reality is illustrated by the fact that a disproportionate number of people from racial and minority ethnic groups have been infected and killed by COVID-19.…”

Section: The Blueprint Of Disaster: Unequal Ecological Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The blueprint of disaster: COVID-19, the Flint water crisis, and unequal ecological impacts

Ezell¹,

Griswold²,

Chase³

et al. 2021

The Lancet Planetary Health

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COVID-19 is unique in the scope of its effects on morbidity and mortality. However, the factors contributing to its disparate racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic effects are part of an expansive and continuous history of oppressive social policy and marginalising geopolitics. This history is characterised by institutionally generated spatial inequalities forged through processes of residential segregation and neglectful urban planning. In the USA, aspects of COVID-19's manifestation closely mirror elements of the build-up and response to the Flint crisis, Michigan's racially and class-contoured water crisis that began in 2014, and to other prominent environmental injustice cases, such as the 1995 Chicago (IL, USA) heatwave that severely affected the city's south and west sides, predominantly inhabited by Black people. Each case shares common macrosocial and spatial characteristics and is instructive in showing how civic trust suffers in the aftermath of public health disasters, becoming especially degenerative among historically and spatially marginalised populations. Offering a commentary on the sociogeographical dynamics that gave rise to these crises and this institutional distrust, we discuss how COVID-19 has both inherited and augmented patterns of spatial inequality. We conclude by outlining particular steps that can be taken to prevent and reduce spatial inequalities generated by COVID-19, and by discussing the preliminary steps to restore trust between historically disenfranchised communities and the public officials and institutions tasked with responding to COVID-19.

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Section: The Blueprint Of Disaster: Unequal Ecological Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Blueprint Of Disaster: Unequal Ecological Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Blueprint Of Disaster: Unequal Ecological Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The blueprint of disaster: COVID-19, the Flint water crisis, and unequal ecological impacts

Ezell¹,

Griswold²,

Chase³

et al. 2021

The Lancet Planetary Health

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…One recurrent phrase we heard from Flint residents during our research was 'I don't trust it', with the subject applying to Flint's water, the water management system, and expert research on water. This erosion of trust is rooted in a history of racialized urban inequality and the contemporary failure of democracy facilitated through urban austerity measures tied to Flint's financial struggles (Pauli, 2019;Sadler and Highsmith, 2016). Structural racism in the housing laws of the 1950s, led to racially motivated disinvestment starting in the 1960s, causing Flint's population and economy to shrink drastically.…”

Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s a sprint, not a marathon: a case for building short-term partnerships for community-based participatory research

Radonic

Jacob

Kalman

et al. 2021

Qualitative Research

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Academic calendars and university timelines set an urgent pace for researchers, which can hinder the establishment of long-term community partnerships. Given community-based participatory research’s (CBPR) emphasis on community-led research, time constraints can inhibit academic researchers’ commitments to collaborative methodologies and participatory research. This article considers how CBPR can be adapted for shorter-term engagements while still producing mutually beneficial research. In doing so, we contribute to the existing corpus on rapid assessment methodologies, characterized for adopting methods traditionally practiced over a longer duration to shorter time frames. We review the successes and limitations of a CBPR project executed within the timespan of six months in Flint, Michigan. In the case discussed, photo-voice enabled the inclusion of diverse ways of knowing, horizontal partnerships, reciprocal learning, and an accessible disemmination format within a CBPR framework. In conclusion we assert that there is value in short-term CBPR, especially for emergent issues where there is a need for rapid, responsive methodologies. However, short-term CBPR is a sprint, rather than a marathon; although shorter in duration, it is more intensive. It requires significant methodological commitments, flexibility, and an intensified workload for those involved.

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“…The qualitative review of the resulting articles showed no clear emergence of race, ethnicity, and water security issues. Unsurprisingly, the high-profile case of Flint, Michigan, where systemic environmental racism factored into water security outcomes, was prominent in the search (Pauli 2019(Pauli , 2020. Other articles focused on shifting conceptual understandings of water security to incorporate racial and ethnic concerns.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Race, Ethnicity, and the Case for Intersectional Water Security

Harrington¹,

Montana²,

Schmidt³

et al. 2023

Global Environmental Politics

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This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security, of which less than 1 percent explicitly focus on race or ethnicity. This is deeply concerning, because it indicates that race and ethnicity—crucial factors that affect the provision of safe, reliable water—continue to be ignored in academic and policy literatures. In response to this finding the Forum calls for building intersectional water security frameworks that recognize how empirical drivers of social and environmental inequality vary both within and across groups. Intersectional frameworks of water security can retain policy focus on the key material concerns regarding access, safety, and the distribution of water-related risks. They can also explicitly incorporate issues of race and ethnicity alongside other vectors of inequality to address key, overlooked concerns of water security.

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Review: Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

The blueprint of disaster: COVID-19, the Flint water crisis, and unequal ecological impacts

The blueprint of disaster: COVID-19, the Flint water crisis, and unequal ecological impacts

It’s a sprint, not a marathon: a case for building short-term partnerships for community-based participatory research

Race, Ethnicity, and the Case for Intersectional Water Security

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