Water is Life

Water is life. Every household in America needs and is entitled to clean and safe water access. Yet, the magnitude of lack of clean water access in Indian country is significant and startling. Our report uncovers the four main factors that have exacerbated gaps in tribal drinking water access, and in turn hurt public health and economic growth:

Environmental Racism in Indianapolis

Community-engaged research, grounded in the humanities and social sciences and rooted in ethnographic methods, can provide important insights into the ways that environmental racism impacts neighborhoods and communities. The Anthropocene Household project at the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute explores the current geological epoch, the Age of Humans, on a local level through the lens of the household in order to understand the experiences, knowledges, and practices associated with environmental change. In my research, I am looking at these experiences and understandings specifically related to environmental racism. In this paper I would like to explore two different examples of environmental racism in Indianapolis. One illustrates how white privilege plays a role in creating environmental racism and the other shows the impact of white supremacy in shaping government response to an issue of environmental racism. Both examples demonstrate the value in foregrounding the voices and experiences of the people who are living in these impacted communities. We cannot develop meaningful interventions into environmental racism without understanding these lived experiences and creating space to hear these voices.

Addressing Risks of Lead in Water and Soil

One of the most widespread environmental health hazards in the United States remains exposure to the harmful neurotoxin lead. So much lead remains in the urban environment that it is not unusual to find neighborhoods where more than 10% of children exhibit harmful levels of lead, compared to the national average of about 1%. To overcome this challenge, a partnership between IUPUI researchers and faith organizations in Indianapolis is taking aim at the risk of household lead contamination by providing residents the tools they need to protect against it. The community-driven science aspect of this project is intentional—not only will the individuals who participate benefit directly, but the resulting data will also play a role in keeping communities safer more broadly.

Gaze and Occupy

Katerina Tsiopos’ poetry examines the dilemmas that humans, animals, and the natural environment share in symbiotic, parasitic, and often deadly co-existence. The persistence of human life exacts a toll on nature; yet what sacrifices are humans willing to make to leave a smaller footprint. Following in the tradition of American transcendentalist poets, 20th-century poststructuralist and black eco-poets, Katerina hails 21st-century eco-sensibilities by curating poetry readings that capture human culpability intertwined with eco-relationships. In these powerful and personal poems, she offers readers/listeners no eco-action plans, no comfort zones--just our complicity in green.

More Than Just an Academic Exercise

Critical policy analysis (CPA) is a means by which to critique policy and promote agency, equity, and justice. However, most CPA scholars examine political discourse from a distance rather than actively participate in political processes. Meanwhile, there's a growing interest in community-engaged research whereby academics partner with community members in their research endeavors. In this article, we consider the value of conjoining the philosophies and processes behind both CPA and community-engaged research to create more powerful and meaningful research endeavors that potentially can lead to political action and policy change. For this article, we present a subset of data from a larger study that asked education policy scholars how critical policy analysis informs their work and what they consider to be key objectives of this approach. We focus on a subsection of participants who demonstrated how and what ways they consider community-engaged scholarship to be an essential component of CPA.

City Care: Historical and Contemporary Lessons from Environmental Justice Coalition-Building

This article examines the historical roots of the challenges facing contemporary climate justice advocacy campaigns, and draws lessons from this history regarding how to more comprehensively address racial equity in resilience planning and environmentalist advocacy. As the modern US environmental movement gained momentum in the 1970s, fault lines developed between environmentalists and civil rights advocates. A key source of tension was debates over whether urban environments were deserving of the same kinds of environmental protections as more traditional and pristine forms of “nature.” African Americans’ prioritization of economic equity alongside legal equality also led to a critical dialogue about economic growth and the economic externalities of regulating industry and safeguarding the environment. This article draws on environmental justice and environmental history scholarship as integrated lenses for analyzing racialized debates during the early years of the modern American environmental movement. I trace how public deliberations played out regarding the first Earth Day in 1970, and the City Care Conference of 1979—the first national conference that brought together major environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and civil rights organizations such as the National Urban League to deliberate the linkages between racial equity and environmentalism. Finally, I connect these historical analyses to recent data from the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute’s Hoosier Life Survey in order to better understand contemporary racialized disparities of climate change vulnerability, and relatedly, of climate change opinion.

Exploring University-Community Collaborations

The Riverside neighborhood bears multiple burdens of environmental harm. Running the gamut from groundwater contamination in subsurface waters to lead in soils and dust and paint to particulate matter in the air from highways and industry, these environmental insults harm the physical, mental, and economic well-being of the community. The community has also faced an information gap where data was scarce, hard to locate, and sometimes wrong. Activists have long worked to improve the quality of life in the neighborhood, but faced barriers in the form of policies (e.g. Red Lining, zoning variances, disinvestment in public services such as street lights and sidewalks) and practices (e.g. absentee landlords, illegal dumping). Features such as the Central Canal that were developed into recreational amenities in other parts of the city were minimally maintained or restricted from use by residents. In the face of these challenges, IUPUI faculty, students, and community members have partnered on multiple projects to document the history of environmental harms, assess exposure and risk of residents’ exposomes, and share information in ways that are accessible and relevant for residents. The work supports the agency and activism of the community, particularly as it faces pressures of gentrification and university encroachment with the prospect of 16 Tech project expansion. The work also takes place in the context of contested interests and harmful legacies as representatives of an urban university that displaced longtime residents work to partner ethically and transparently with those same communities. As a result, current faculty-community collaborations operate within a space complicated by the problematic legacy of harm and ongoing structural racism. However well-intentioned, faculty, students and community members have to navigate that history and enduring power dynamics as they design their research, identify relevant questions, and share results in ways that are accessible and meaningful to community members.

Pursuing Peace Amidst the Mass Incarceration of Black Males

There can be no peace in this nation without first addressing the crisis of massincarceration among Black males. To address this concern, it is necessary toexplore the experiences of those affected through community engaged research andinvolve these individuals in developing solutions to address this problem. I am agraduate student in the IU School of Education at IUPUI pursuing a doctorate inUrban Studies. I am studying about the impacts on communities when Black boysare poorly educated in leaky K-12 pipelines and grow up to be disproportionatelyincarcerated. My research asks, what were the motivations, barriers and resourcesimpacting the experiences of African American males who were incarcerated andthen decide to pursue an education after they have been released into ourcommunities. I want to know in what ways does achieving more education, gettinga high school diploma or a bachelor’s degree, affect their lives and ourcommunities? Community engaged and community based participatoryresearchers need to ask questions about the effects of this phenomenon.