The author, Chad Raphael, is the Faculty Associate for Sustainability across the Curriculum at Santa Clara University and Co-Coordinator of the Environmental Justice and the Common Good Initiative. Raphael is considered a prominent scholar in political and environmental communication and has served as a consultant in designing communication campaigns for many environmental organizations. In his position as researcher and professor, Raphael remains committed to integrating his research and teaching by continually co-publishing with undergraduate students.
“Reflexivity should act as a check on academic anxieties about scholarly identity and status, on professional and disciplinary insularity, and self-regard. Reflexivity reminds us that discipline-building – increasing access to grants, recognition, and seats at the policy table – is a means to larger ends, not an end in itself. It pushes us to worry less about whether we are distinguishing ourselves from other fields and more about whether we are collaborating well with scholars from other disciplines and with community actors to address society’s most significant challenges and imagine their solutions.” (Raphael, p 16)
“The research cited above has begun to document inequities within countries, and between countries in the global North and South, and how they are driven by colonial legacies, corporate exploitation, governmental policies and corruption, intergovernmental agreements and organizations, international foundations, and consumer demand. However, scholars from a handful of countries account for most of this research. Of all scholarly articles published in 2009 with the keyword “environmental justice,” almost half were authored by researchers based in the U.S., 20 percent were written by authors in the U.K., and 60 percent exclusively addressed U.S. cases (Reed & George, 2011). While this distribution in part reflects global scholars’ preference for other terms for EJ issues, it should also alert us to the need to extend the scholarly community beyond dominant Anglo-American academic institutions and to address EJ around the globe.” (Raphael, p 11)
Through this guide, Raphael makes a case for ES within EJ research. Particularly, Raphael articulates the value ES in: 1) building scholarly relevance and promoting restorative justice, 2) improving methodological designs in communication research, 3) reaching a wider pool of audiences in ways that are translatable to the public sphere, and 4) prompting greater reflexivity and collaborations by scholars across disciplines. Evidence is cited from a particular case study wherein a collaboration across academic institutions, independent research institutes, and a statewide advocacy organization led to improvements across the four aforementioned spheres for the research project itself. For example, by co-designing materials to increase the visibility and transparency of specialized research on pollution emissions, this collaboration succeeded in relating knowledge around pollution risks and lent strength to a wider organizing campaign to reduce emissions from the Chevron Oil Refinery in Richmond.