Local Struggles for Environmental Justice: Activating Knowledge for Change

Environmental knowledge and how it is acquired and deployed are important features of local environmental politics in the US. This paper is an ethnography of a community-based participatory research effort for environmental justice in Phoenix, Arizona. Residents, professional community activists, and university-based researchers worked together to conduct a health and environmental concerns survey and monitor air quality in a low-income Latino neighborhood. Analysis of this case explores how neighborhood struggles for environmental justice can result in socioenvironmental change through the activation of knowledge in certain political-legal frames. The interpenetration of lay knowledge and expert knowledge during community-based participatory research is theorized to spur environmental justice action when enabled by political-legal structures, and subvert the supposed binary between science and advocacy. The role of the university in community-based participatory research is also examined. Catalysis through involvement, more so than research results, emerges as an important role for the university in influencing environmental justice action.