Learning From Community-Based Efforts Toward Shared Responsibility for Climate and Environmental Justice

Abstract

In this exploratory inquiry, the research team investigates community-based data practices in climate and environmental justice initiatives. We set out to learn from the long history and current activities of communities seeking to hold corporate and government actors responsible to enact care for the climate and environment (e.g., monitoring air quality and waterways affected by petrochemical industries). Through a critical intersectional care ethics lens, we follow how groups respond to harms to ecosystems and seek healing, positioning their epistemic authority as they work with data (e.g., Ottinger, 2023; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). This work draws insights from inquiries which have examined how communities engage with climate action and efforts toward environmental sustainability (e.g., dos Santos et al., 2024; Kaczmarek, 2023; Nathan, 2012).

Through a poster reporting on preliminary research, we share early analyses highlighting communities’ labor of resisting corporate delay, denial, and other dis- and mal-information practices, which slow or block urgently needed action and truth-telling. Methods involve analysis of archival records created by and about communities affected by the Love Canal toxic waste crisis in Western New York. The project aims to appreciate differences and similarities in community-based data practices, identifying further possibilities for information professionals and libraries, archives, and museums to uphold these data practices and associated knowledge and memory work, research, and storytelling. In turn, the team proposes future work to trace the development of community-based practices with climate and environmental data over time.