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1. Youth-Community Invention: Community Epistemologies and Expansive Iterative Design

   Calabrese Barton, A. ( January 2020 , American Education Research Association)

   Objectives We examine the community epistemologies in youth’s iterative refinements of STEM-rich inventions across settings and time. Iteration in STEM-rich engineering/invention work refers to re-thinking ideas/designs within prototyping processes (Cunningham & Kelly, 2017). The objective of this paper is to examine the political dimensions of iteration through a) how iteration involves pre- and post-design “lives” of inventions especially towards new social futures, and b) the intentional incorporation of cultural epistemologies towards advancing new forms of legitimate inventor knowledge/practice (Yosso, 2005). Framing We draw from critical justice and consequential learning studies. Critical justice focuses on recognizing diversity and addressing structural inequalities perpetuated through systemic racism and classism. It seeks re-shifted relations of power and position within multiple scales-of-activity in learning, intersected with historicized injustices in learning environments. Consequential learning examines what matters to people, and how associated values and practices, when coordinated through social activity, allows for imagining new social futures (Gutierrez, 2012). Viewing the iterative process of inventing through a justice-oriented consequential lens calls into question traditional modes of knowing, and challenges/expands who and what areas of expertise are recognized and valued. Methods Our study takes place in two community makerspaces in mid-sized cities. Both center community engagement and support youth in designing/inventing to address problems they and their communities care about. Both also support minoritized youth in inventing through engagement with a wide range of community/STEM stakeholders. In researcher-educator roles, we collaborated with both makerspaces to establish programs supporting youth in sustained engagement in STEM and making/inventing in culturally-sustaining ways. In our two-year, longitudinal critical ethnography, data were generated in weekly community making sessions between 2016-2018. Data include artifacts, youth conversation groups, and videos capturing youth interaction with STEM and community experts at various stages in their design process. Analysis involved multiple stages and levels of coding based on open-coding and constant comparison procedures. Findings We ground our paper in four in-depth longitudinal cases of youth’s iterative design work: Nila’s light-up #stopracism sign; Su’zanne’s massaging slipper, Sharon’s geodesic play dome, and Jazmyn’s portable fan. Across cases, we illustrate three findings. First, youth located broader injustices within local making/inventing discourses with support from community and STEM allies, suggesting youth drew from multiple epistemologies, some grounded in community cultural wealth, others in STEM. For example, Su’Zanne drew from a familial culture of care and resistance in recognizing injustices nested in homelessness while iterating a way to make her slipper “more massaging.” The geodesic dome youth-makers drew from collective solidarity/resistance in making a structure for younger peers due to unjust lack of play infrastructure. Second, iterative engagement involving community wealth afforded further design and inventing experiences and expanded ownership over inventions across many stakeholders. For example, youth turned Nila’s #stopracism sign on during group discussions when they felt that racism needed to be foregrounded. Third, the afterlife of youth invention processes impacted the emergent inventor-maker culture through influencing the iterative process. Significance Iterations expand hybridization of cultural knowledge/practice and STEM-rich inventing, re-shaping whose cultural knowledge matters, and fostering justice-oriented collective outcomes. 

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2. Environmental justice and drinking water: A critical review of primary data studies

   https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1653  

   Karasaki, Seigi ; Goddard, Jessica J. ; Cohen, Alasdair ; Ray, Isha ( May 2023 , WIREs Water)

   Though safe drinking water for all is a global public health goal, disparities in access persist worldwide. We present a critical review of primary‐data based environmental justice (EJ) studies on drinking water. We examine their findings in relation to the broader EJ and drinking water literatures. Using pre‐specified protocols to screen 2423 records, we identified 33 studies for inclusion. We organized our results using the following questions: (1) what sampling and data collection methods are used; (2) how is (un)just access to water defined and measured; (3) what forms of environmental injustice are discussed; (4) how are affected communities resisting or coping; and (5) what, if any, mechanisms of redress are advocated? We find that while many studies analyze the causes and persistence of environmental injustices, most primary‐data studies on drinking water are cross‐sectional in design. Many such studies are motivated by health impacts but few measure drinking water exposures or associated health outcomes. We find that, while distinct types of injustice exist, multiple types are either co‐produced or exacerbate one another. Recognitional injustice is emerging as an undergirding injustice upon which others (distributional or procedural) can take hold. Tensions remain regarding the role of the state; redress for inequitable water access is often presumed to be the state's responsibility, but many EJ scholars argue that the state itself perpetuates inequitable conditions. The accountability for redress under different forms of water governance remains an important area for future research.

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   Human Water > Methods

    

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3. An applied ecology of fear framework: linking theory to conservation practice

   https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.12629  

   Gaynor, Kaitlyn M. ; Cherry, Michael J. ; Gilbert, Sophie L. ; Kohl, Michel T. ; Larson, Courtney L. ; Newsome, Thomas M. ; Prugh, Laura R. ; Suraci, Justin P. ; Young, Julie K. ; Smith, Justine A. ( August 2020 , Animal Conservation)

   null (Ed.)

   Research on the ecology of fear has highlighted the importance of perceived risk from predators and humans in shaping animal behavior and physiology, with potential demographic and ecosystem-wide consequences. Despite recent conceptual advances and potential management implications of the ecology of fear, theory and conservation practices have rarely been linked. Many challenges in animal conservation may be alleviated by actively harnessing or compensating for risk perception and risk avoidance behavior in wild animal populations. Integration of the ecology of fear into conservation and management practice can contribute to the recovery of threatened populations, human–wildlife conflict mitigation, invasive species management, maintenance of sustainable harvest and species reintroduction plans. Here, we present an applied framework that links conservation interventions to desired outcomes by manipulating ecology of fear dynamics. We discuss how to reduce or amplify fear in wild animals by manipulating habitat structure, sensory stimuli, animal experience (previous exposure to risk) and food safety trade-offs to achieve management objectives. Changing the optimal decision-making of individuals in managed populations can then further conservation goals by shaping the spatiotemporal distribution of animals, changing predation rates and altering risk effects that scale up to demographic consequences. We also outline future directions for applied research on fear ecology that will better inform conservation practices. Our framework can help scientists and practitioners anticipate and mitigate unintended consequences of management decisions, and highlight new levers for multi-species conservation strategies that promote human–wildlife coexistence. 

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4. Mapping supply of and demand for ecosystem services to assess environmental justice in New York City

   https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2390  

   Herreros‐Cantis, Pablo ; McPhearson, Timon ( June 2021 , Ecological Applications)

   null (Ed.)

   Livability, resilience, and justice in cities are challenged by climate change and the historical legacies that together create disproportionate impacts on human communities. Urban green infrastructure has emerged as an important tool for climate change adaptation and resilience given their capacity to provide ecosystem services such as local temperature regulation, stormwater mitigation, and air purification. However, realizing the benefits of ecosystem services for climate adaptation depend on where they are locally supplied. Few studies have examined the potential spatial mismatches in supply and demand of urban ecosystem services, and even fewer have examined supply–demand mismatches as a potential environmental justice issue, such as when supply–demand mismatches disproportionately overlap with certain socio-demographic groups. We spatially analyzed demand for ecosystem services relevant for climate change adaptation and combined results with recent analysis of the supply of ecosystem services in New York City (NYC). By quantifying the relative mismatch between supply and demand of ecosystem services across the city we were able to identify spatial hot- and coldspots of supply–demand mismatch. Hotspots are spatial clusters of census blocks with a higher mismatch and coldspots are clusters with lower mismatch values than their surrounding blocks. The distribution of mismatch hot- and coldspots was then compared to the spatial distribution of socio-demographic groups. Results reveal distributional environmental injustice of access to the climate-regulating benefits of ecosystem services provided by urban green infrastructure in NYC. Analyses show that areas with lower supply–demand mismatch tend to be populated by a larger proportion of white residents with higher median incomes, and areas with high mismatch values have lower incomes and a higher proportion of people of color. We suggest that urban policy and planning should ensure that investments in “nature-based” solutions such as through urban green infrastructure for climate change adaptation do not reinforce or exacerbate potentially existing environmental injustices. 

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5. Infrastructural injustices in community‐driven afterschool STEAM

   https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21852  

   Shea, Molly V. ; Jurow, A. Susan ; Schiffer, Jovita ; Escudé, Meg ; Torres, Aurora ( February 2023 , Journal of Research in Science Teaching)

   This article offers a qualitative analysis of infrastructural in/justice in a community‐partnered design intervention focused on developing high‐tech low‐cost Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) projects. We examined the kinds of infrastructural injustices that were present in three afterschool programs and how it shaped STEAM education designs and opportunities for learning with technology to take hold. Combining insights and methods from studies of science and technology with Critical Race Theory, we developed the concept of infrastructural in/justice to illuminate the challenges of organizing STEAM for justice. Infrastructural injustices were identified at the level of dominant narratives that shaped the ideas, resources, and values that undergirded programming and pedagogical practices. We found that community educators were central to creating more just STEAM infrastructures. They drew out unjust infrastructural narratives, created counternarratives that allowed young people of color space to expand their technology and STEAM practices, and connected these practices to their everyday lives, identities, and emerging interests. We detail how working‐class community educators of color are dreaming and enacting new ways to engage with STEAM and STEAM education alongside young people. As we have shown, their ideas and practices combined with the young people's visions for the future challenged neoliberal and racialized narratives of STEAM. Despite community educators' of color critical expertise, their jobs remained precarious within informal STEAM infrastructures. To design for and sustain more just community‐driven STEAM activities we argue that the field must attend not only to how the work of infrastructuring to how community‐driven STEAM is done but also by whom. These activities, organized by community educators of color, must be valued and protected through the classification systems within informal STEAM infrastructures in order to design and sustain more just community‐driven STEAM initiatives.

    

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