Ground Truths: Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

This is the first book devoted entirely to summarizing the body of community-engaged research on environmental justice, how we can conduct more of it, and how we can do it better. It shows how community-engaged research makes unique contributions to environmental justice for Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities by centering local knowledge, building truth from the ground up, producing actionable data that can influence decisions, and transforming researchers’ relationships to communities for equity and mutual benefit. The book offers a critical synthesis of relevant research in many fields, outlines the main steps in conducting community-engaged research, evaluates the major research methods used, suggests new directions, and addresses overcoming institutional barriers to scholarship in academia. The coauthors employ an original framework that shows how community-engaged research and environmental justice align, which links research on the many topics treated in the chapters—from public health, urban planning, and conservation to law and policy, community economic development, and food justice and sovereignty.
 

Chad Raphael is Professor of Communication, and Co-Coordinator of the Environmental Justice and the Common Good Initiative, at Santa Clara University. He has been a community organizer, funder, and researcher for environmental justice for over twenty-five years.

Martha Matsuoka is Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Executive Director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. She grew up in the movement for environmental justice which continues to anchor and inform her teaching, research, and activism.