On October 23, 5-6pm PDT, the Environmental Injustice Teaching Team will host a 1-hour virtual workshop. Participants will learn to use a research framework that examines many different factors that contribute to environmental problems (social, political, economic, biochemical, technological) in Santa Ana, California.
No prior experience with research or environmental data is expected. The workshop is designed for mutual learning.
Follow @environmental_injustice to receive updates about the case study workshop. You can also join the mailing list for the Beyond Environmental Injustice Teaching Collective.
The workshop is open to everyone, including researchers, teachers, students and community members. The goal is to create an opportunity to work together, leveraging different skills and easily accessible environmental data resources.
Part of the workshop will focus on ways local organizations like Orange County Environmental Justice can use data provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency and other sources to show how and where environmental injustice is happening in Santa Ana.
The workshop will have three parts:
5:00–5:15pm | The UCI Teaching Team shares what we have learned about environmental injustice in Orange County so far (for example through our students’ case study research and OCEJ’s community-based research on lead)
5:15–5:45pm | In breakout groups, we will quickly build an environmental justice case study for Santa Ana, drawing in different things people know about the community
5:45–6:00pm | Groups briefly report back and think together about the next steps for building a case study and lively archive.
The workshop will be discussion based, drawing on community knowledge and a range of interactive civic data resources. All are welcome. The more perspectives we have, the better case study we can build!
To guide our discussion, the workshop will focus on the ten analytical questions below:
1) What is the setting of this case?
2) What environmental threats (from worst case scenarios, pollution and climate change) are there in this setting?
3) What intersecting factors -- social, cultural, political, technological, ecological -- contribute to environmental health vulnerability and injustice in this setting?
4) Who are stakeholders, what are their characteristics, and what are their perceptions of the problems?
5) What have different stakeholder groups done (or not done) in response to the problems in this case?
6) How have environmental problems in this setting been reported on by media, environmental groups, companies and government agencies?
7) What local actions would reduce environmental vulnerability and injustice in this setting?
8) What extra-local actions (at state, national or international levels) would reduce environmental vulnerability and injustice in this setting and similar settings?
9) What kinds of data and research would be useful in efforts to characterize and address environmental threats in this setting and similar settings?
10) What, in your view, is ethically wrong or unjust in this case?
Through the workshop, participants will learn to identify different tactics and strategies -- local, state and national -- that can help address environmental injustice, contributing to advocacy work. The UCI Teaching Team will also bring what is developed back to UCI, using the case study to help students understand environmental injustice in very local terms. If there is interest, additional workshops can be planned to keep working together and building out the Santa Ana case. We would welcome collaboration with K-12 teachers, for example, or sessions focused specifically on possible actions at the county level.
The collaborative case study approach to understanding and strategizing against environmental injustice was developed at UCI in a lower-division undergraduate course taught by Prof. Kim Fortun, Kaitlyn Rabach, Tim Schütz, Maggie Woodruff, Prerna Srigyan, titled “Environmental Injustice” (EiJ). We hope to use the course to draw students into work to move beyond environmental injustice. We are always especially happy to have students and community members from Orange County.
See below for material produced by students in the course.
