Environmental Justice Reseachers Need Emotional Wisdom
To heal the relationship between universities and communities requires emotional labor
Research requires intellectual work. It also requires emotion work. Emotion work is the managing of one's emotions and tailoring one's behavior so as not to evoke emotional responses from others. A feminist approach sees this labor as a form of care work. Feminist scholars have shown that this work is gendered and racialized, often undertaken by women and people of color. It is also under-valued, which reinforces systems of oppression.
We encountered the challenges of uneven distribution of emotional labor in the Environmental Justice Leaders Program, run in collaboration with the Institute of Transportation Studies. Our community collaborators often had to perform significant emotional work to maintain relations--a dynamic exacerbated by the systemic power differential between university researchers and EJ professionals working in grassroots organizations.
Our insights were recently published in an academic paper, Healing Relationships: Emotion Work in Environmental Justice Community-University Partnerships, published open access in Environmental Justice. We sought to examine how care work was done (or not done) from multiple angles. This was accomplished by co-authoring the paper with three EJ Leader alumni, Katia Carranza, Rio Oxas, and Ruth Rosas, former Co-Director of the Environmental Justice Leaders Program Selika Josiah Talbott, graduate students Megan Williams and Patricia Arnal-Luna, program managers Mayra Sanchez Barba and Juan Carlos Garcia Sanchez, and Director Sarah Rebolloso McCullough.
The paper includes the following recommendations for university researchers.
- Center your community partners. This requires genuinely prioritizing the community’s well-being over academic priorities.
- Respect and honor the wisdom and labor of community partners. This means treating them as a full research partner and providing commensurate compensation.
- Learn trauma-informed research practices. This requires developing one's own emotional wisdom as a researchers.
- Interrogate cultural norms, epistemic hierarchies, and basic assumptions within your academic field. There is a rich literature in feminist science studies and participatory research to inform this process, as well as research training programs.
- Reflect on your positionalities in relationship to others. This includes one's social identities, relations to privileges and oppression, values and worldviews, and assumptions.
- Build in time for relationship development, prioritizing process over product. Move at the speed of trust rather than project deadlines.
- Foster cultural humility and a willingness to experience discomfort and uncertainty. When researchers grow this capacity, it can lessen the emotional burden for community partners.
- Thoughtfully build infrastructure. Set clear expectations and boundaries in writing, while also holding flexibility to revise the plans as circumstances may change.
- Provide multiyear funding and institutional support for timely payments. Payment systems should be transparent, easy to navigate and responsive.