Undisciplining environmental justice research with visual storytelling

Abstract

Environmental justice research has used maps to make visible the spatial correlations between hazardous waste disposal sites and poor and minority communities since the 1970s. No doubt, such visual evidence of marginalized communities disproportionately burdened with noxious facilities has been an important and powerful tool for activists, regulators, and educators. Despite the efficacy of such mappings in demonstrating unjust distributions of waste, critics argue that they do not capture the complicated processes behind this spatial phenomenon. In this paper, we discuss our pursuit of an “undisciplined” environmental justice project by using visualization, not solely as the traditional product of research, but also as a process for raising new lines of inquiry into the social and environmental dynamics at work in the landscape. To this end, we present one strategy we have used in our project to construct and creatively visualize a novel dataset on the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America. Specifically, we convened a one-day “Design Challenge” with geography students from several sub-disciplines. This event yielded new avenues for international environmental justice research on and visualization of the transnational waste trade, identified methods for and concerns about critical storytelling with large datasets, and highlighted the opportunities and challenges of using critical storytelling to undiscipline EJ research. The paper presents logistics leading up to the Design Challenge, key insights and critical discussion resulting from the day, and interviews conducted one year after the Design Challenge on enduring lessons from the process.