Abstract
Community-university partnerships have been shown to produce significant value for both sets of partners by providing reciprocal learning opportunities, (re)building bonds of trust, and creating unique venues to formulate and apply research that responds to community interests and informs collaborative solutions to community problems. For such partnerships to be mutually empowering, certain design characteristics are necessary. These include mutual respect for different modes and expressions of knowledge, capacity-building for all parties, and an environment that promotes honest and constructive dialogue about the inevitable tensions associated with the interplay of power/knowledge. This article explores an innovative case of community-university partnerships through participatory action research involving a coalition of environmental justice and health advocates, the San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project, and researchers affiliated with the University of California, Davis. In particular, we examine how participatory GIS and community mapping can promote co-learning and interdependent science. 
 
 Keywords 
 Community-based participatory research, environmental justice, Public Participation Geographic Information System
Highlights
Community-university partnerships have been shown to produce significant value for both sets of partners, providing reciprocal learning opportunities,building of bonds of trust, and creating unique venues to formulate and apply research that responds to community interests and informs collaborative solutions to community problems (Peterson, Minkler & Vásquez 2006; Minkler & Hancock 2003, Seifer 2003; Tajik & Minkler 2006)
The community-university and participatory action research approach in this project offers two major findings: ——Public Participation GIS does not merely document community knowledge, but can promote mutually beneficial co-learning between academics and advocates, as well as spatial representations and analyses that reflect the multiple scales of social movement organising. ——The sustainability of community-university partnerships is not based on a lack of mistakes in the relationship, but instead on the ability to build resilience over time and draw strength from responses to challenges experienced and overcome
One early challenge addressed in these initial meetings was the fact that UC Davis project funding had been received prior to establishing a formal relationship with SJV CHIP and without consultation with regional partners. While this timing resulted from a longer-term grant from the Ford Foundation, which UC Davis subsequently sought to make available for its work in the San Joaquin Valley, this raised a tension with a fundamental principle of environmental justice in which activists seek to ‘speak for themselves’ and play lead roles in shaping policies and programs that affect them, including the allocation of funding
Summary
Community-university partnerships have been shown to produce significant value for both sets of partners, providing reciprocal learning opportunities, (re)building of bonds of trust, and creating unique venues to formulate and apply research that responds to community interests and informs collaborative solutions to community problems (Peterson, Minkler & Vásquez 2006; Minkler & Hancock 2003, Seifer 2003; Tajik & Minkler 2006). For such partnerships to be mutually empowering, certain design characteristics are necessary, including respect for different modes and expressions of knowledge, capacity-building for all parties, and an environment that promotes honest and constructive dialogue about inevitable tensions associated with the interplay of knowledge and power.
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