“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)
