Doing environmental justice: Prospects for sustainable engagement—From classroom to fieldwork

Abstract

In response to national attention on questions of how racial justice is still unrealized, different academic institutes have sought to increase diversity and justice in their curricula, institutional practices, and immersive experiences for their students. This has normally taken the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. Yet there remain significant obstacles to how inequities and lack of attention to power differential across race, class, and gender continue to create imbalances that affect the ability to conduct just research. In this piece, I describe six critical points of engagement for sustainable engagement for just research. These concerns range from the field to the classroom and identify how existing structures can reinforce dominant narratives and understandings linked to colonial histories of extraction and the exploitation of knowledge. I offer tangible and credible alternatives for grounding knowledge generation in ways that are less restrictive than the coercive practices of the past.