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 sci-ence 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. (C) 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.