“We've Been Studied to Death, We Ain't Gotten Anything”: (Re)claiming environmental knowledge production through the praxis of writing collectives

Kohl, Ellen

doi:10.1080/10455752.2015.1104705

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…How can we know and understand agency and resistance beyond this labor and time demanding framing? Secondly, spectacular activism is often restricted to state-reliant approaches, which have long been unsuccessful for EJ (Pulido, 2000(Pulido, , 2017bWright, 2018). Often, this approach does not attend to the historic relationship between Black communities and the state.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This article pushes EJ scholars to not end with the reification of inevitable and imminent Black death or to essentialize Black life to spectacular activism. I aim to push EJ scholars to behold Black livingness and futurity experienced in close proximity to death (Sharpe, 2016) Scholars have called for EJ researchers to develop a more profound understanding and engagement with critical ethnic and race studies (Kohl, 2015;Pulido, 2017a;Vasudevan, 2019;Wright, 2018). Deeper integration of these fields is imperative as EJ has long written on communities of color, but, as of yet, has had little engagement with areas of intellectual practice that are built on the life experiences and ontologies of these communities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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More than just dying: Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism

Bruno

2023

Environ Plan D

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Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship has long done work in and on Black communities. Yet, the field’s engagement with critical race studies has been rather recent and limited. This paper questions what we learn about Black living from EJ scholarship. I argue that there are two main registers of Black living in EJ scholarship: dying and activism. I draw on Black feminist geographies to think and imagine EJ work that incorporates nuance to the modalities of Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental injustice. The goal of this is not to deter EJ scholars from exposing instantiations of environmental injustice in the world, nor to undermine the deadly realities of EJ communities. Rather, this paper pushes EJ scholars to be wary of essentializing Black communities to death and decay and urges these scholars to behold Black life and futurity experienced in close proximity to death in these spaces. I provide examples of Black living and making way for Black futurity that occurs beyond the registers of dying and activism in EJ communities, such as care, Black intellectual life, and refusal, registers made apparent through a Black geographies lens.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than just dying: Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism

Bruno

2023

Environ Plan D

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“…If the Akwasasne case shows how collaboration works in both of the senses introduced above (i.e., transdisciplinary environmental health research and as community-based participatory research), we fi nd a distinct but complementary example in the Newtown Florist Club (NFC) and its collaboration with university-based researchers (Yen-Kohl and NFCWC 2016). Th e NFC was founded in Gainesville, Georgia, in 1950, when a predominantly Black group of women established a mutual-aid fund for funeral expenses and then, in dialog with the civil rights movement, came to act as defenders of environmental justice.…”

Section: Collaborative Research As Collective Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toxic Research

Theriault

Kang

2021

Environment and Society

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In a world saturated by toxic substances, the plight of exposed populations has figured prominently in a transdisciplinary body of work that we call political ecologies of toxics. This has, in turn, sparked concerns about the unintended consequences of what Eve Tuck calls “damage-centered research,” which can magnify the very harms it seeks to mitigate. Here, we examine what political ecologists have done to address these concerns. Beginning with work that links toxic harm to broader forces of dispossession and violence, we turn next to reckonings with the queerness, generativity, and even protectiveness of toxics. Together, these studies reveal how the fetishization of purity obscures complex forms of toxic entanglement, stigmatizes “polluted” bodies, and can thereby do as much harm as toxics themselves. We conclude by showing, in dialog with Tuck, how a range of collaborative methodologies (feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and more-than-human) have advanced our understanding of toxic harm while repositioning research as a form of community-led collective action.

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“…Part of changing how research is done might involve jointly writing up research findings, so that those who collected the data or were research participants are also given opportunities to participate in analysis and writing. As others have noted, joint writing can be challenging and requires greater time commitment and flexibility, however the process of working alongside communities to analyse data about them brings significant depth to research findings [55][56][57].…”

Section: Enabling Flexible Ways Of Interacting and Workingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research as usual in humanitarian settings? Equalising power in academic-NGO research partnerships through co-production

Lokot

Wake

2021

Confl Health

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Background Research partnerships in conflict-affected and humanitarian settings can reveal complex power hierarchies between academics and NGOs. During the process of research, decision-making may skew in favour of more powerful actors, who often direct the scope of the research, hold the budget and lead the analysis. Co-production is increasingly emerging as a helpful approach that attempts to equalise power dynamics during research. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the main challenges associated with a “research as usual” approach to research partnerships in humanitarian settings, as power hierarchies may be particularly magnified in these settings. Methods This paper is based on a comprehensive literature review and 32 semi-structured interviews with academics and practitioners from non-government organisations. Participants were selected purposively based on their experience in co-producing research or working within research partnerships. Some participants had worked in humanitarian settings while others had experience co-producing research in non-humanitarian contexts. We used Nvivo to thematically code data. Results This paper documents the problems with “research as usual” partnerships in humanitarian settings, specifically: the burden on communities as merely sources of data, certain forms of knowledge being valued over others, lack of reflection on the power hierarchies structuring research partnerships, top-down decision-making and lack of transparency, one-way “capacity-building”, lack of mutual benefit, and rigid research processes and timeframes. Conclusion This paper highlights key challenges with standard research practices in humanitarian settings and identifies seven key principles of co-production that can be helpful in attempting to equalise power dynamics within research partnerships, specifically in conflict-affected and humanitarian settings.

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“We've Been Studied to Death, We Ain't Gotten Anything”: (Re)claiming environmental knowledge production through the praxis of writing collectives

Cited by 10 publications

References 10 publications

More than just dying: Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism

More than just dying: Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism

Toxic Research

Research as usual in humanitarian settings? Equalising power in academic-NGO research partnerships through co-production

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