Collaboration to confront contamination: leveraging critical physical geography alliances for community-serving research across gardens, superfunds, and fire ravaged landscapes

There are numerous studies about the effects of contamination on communities and environmental injustices that are associated with these impacts. While studies on contamination often highlight impacts to human health, ecosystem degradation, and calls for integration of social justice into research studies on communities, there is relatively sparse literature on how to integrate these methods, and especially on methodologies that demonstrate how to create reciprocal studies that center community voice. As complex and dynamic environmental injustices persist, more researchers are becoming aware that mixed-methods approaches, attention to power relations, and reciprocal scholarship are needed to address contamination in the environment. This paper provides an example of how researchers from two universities and an indigenous conservation group collaborated to share strategies for mitigating exposure to contamination in communities exposed to contamination from urban garden spaces, superfund sites, and from the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history to date. Many of these strategies are rooted in the discipline of Critical Physical Geography, which calls for critical attention to power relations while integrating biophysical and social methods.