





































ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID, GABRIEL FILIPPELLI with PHYLLIS BOYD, PAULA BROOKS, 
AGHILAH NADARAJ, ALVIN SANGSUWANGUL, and LEAH HUMPHREY

Exploring  
University-Community 
Collaborations

ABSTRACT
The Riverside neighborhood bears 
multiple burdens of environmental 
harm. Running the gamut from 
groundwater contamination in 
subsurface waters to lead in soils and 
dust and paint to particulate matter 
in the air from highways and 
industry, these environmental 
insults harm the physical, mental, 
and economic well-being of the 
community. The community has also 
faced an information gap where data 
was scarce, hard to locate, 
and sometimes wrong. Activists have 
long worked to improve the quality 
of life in the neighborhood, but faced 
barriers in the form of policies (e.g. 
Red Lining, zoning variances, 
disinvestment in public services such 
as street lights and sidewalks) and 
practices (e.g. absentee landlords, 
illegal dumping). Features such as 
the Central Canal that were 
developed into recreational 
amenities in other parts of the city 

were minimally maintained or 
restricted from use by residents. In 
the face of these challenges, IUPUI 
faculty, students, and community 
members have partnered on 
multiple projects to document the 
history of environmental harms, 
assess exposure and risk of residents’ 
exposomes, and share information in 
ways that are accessible and relevant 
for residents. The work supports the 
agency and activism of the 
community, particularly as 
it faces pressures of gentrification 
and university encroachment with 
the prospect of 16 Tech project 
expansion. The work also takes place 
in the context of contested interests 
and harmful legacies 
as representatives of an urban 
university that displaced longtime 
residents work to partner ethically 
and transparently with those same 
communities. As a result, current 
faculty-community collaborations 
operate within a space complicated 

32

Authors 
ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID 
IUPUI

GABRIEL FILIPPELLI 
IUPUI

PHYLLIS BOYD 
Groundwork Indy

PAULA BROOKS 
Hoosier Environmental 
Council

AGHILAH NADARAJ 
Kheprw Institute

ALVIN SANGSUWANGUL 
Kheprw Institute

LEAH HUMPHREY 
Kheprw Institute

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by the problematic legacy of harm and ongoing 
structural racism. However well-intentioned, 
faculty, students and community members have to 
navigate that history and enduring power dynamics 
as they design their research, identify relevant 
questions, and share results in ways that are 
accessible and meaningful to community members.

INTRODUCTION
University-community collaborations are 
complicated, and when tackling environmental 
justice issues, they can be particularly difficult. This 
essay explores some of the challenges and benefits 
of two community engaged environmental justice 
projects from the perspective of IUPUI faculty 
members Elizabeth Kryder-Reid and Gabriel 
Filippelli in consultation with community partners, 
and drawing on insights from students involved 
in one of the projects. Both projects focus on the 
Riverside neighborhood, the area northwest of 
downtown Indianapolis and north of the expanding 
IUPUI campus. We begin with a discussion of 
the power dynamics of the collaboration and a 
brief introduction to the Riverside neighborhood. 
We then share two projects as case studies to 
illuminate the potential and problematics of 
environmental justice collaborations between 
a large urban university and small, non-profit 
advocacy organizations.

IUPUI’s commitment to community engagement 
presumes that there is an exchange of value in 
community-based teaching and research. The 
faculty who invest in community-engaged work 
recognize the time and energy it takes to build 
relationships and trust with partners. They 
accept the work it takes to produce results that 
are accessible to community members, whether 
that is sharing the work in community forums 
or developing digital tools that expand public 
access to data. Community partners who enter 
into collaborations with IUPUI know full well 

the institution’s history of displacement and the 
asymmetry of budgets, staff, and other metrics 
that are typically commensurate with institutional 
power. 

Within higher education, community-engaged 
projects are understood to be fraught with 
disparities of access, authority, and accountability. 
Scholars studying community engagement have 
mapped the exchange values on trajectories 
of transactional to transformative (Bringle, 
Clayton, and Price 2009; Dumlao 2018) and 
debated the merits of tactical versus strategic 
partnerships (Feigenbaum 2010– 2011, Mathieu 
2005, 2012, Parks 2009). Rachael Shah has 
proposed a conceptual framework of “critical 
community-based epistemologies” which 
posits that “community partners are holders 
and producers of powerful knowledge, and 
these knowledges can be invaluable in shaping 
engagement collaborations.” (Shah 2020: 107). 
She argues that this epistemology should both 
inform the “ethical vision that acknowledges 
the importance of community member voices, 
perspectives, and priorities” (109) and the power 
dynamics so that community partners can hold 
universities accountable. For IUPUI faculty, 
the value of community expertise is not only a 
fundamental principle, but a powerful driver of 
our motivations. Community partners’ expertise 
and lived experience are a foundational knowledge 
base. At the same time, course-based projects 

33 VO L .  3,  I S S U E  1

through an academic lens, while 
for community partners the issues 

of environmental harm and the slow 
violence to their neighborhoods are 
lived experiences.

Faculty and students 
generally approach projects 



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inherently align with university schedules, ways of 
working, and desired outputs and outcomes. They 
are, therefore, often not in sync with community 
partners’ many obligations, priorities, ways of 
knowing and working. At a pragmatic level, 
faculty are paid to teach and do research, and it is 
both expected and in our professional interest to 
produce scholarship about our work (such as this 
article). For community partners, the time to meet, 
write, edit, and respond to requests for information 
is unpaid labor that comes on top of the already 
heavy loads of frontline community development, 
advocacy, and social justice work. 

There is often an asymmetry or divergence at 
an emotional level as well. Faculty and students 
generally approach projects through an academic 
lens, while for community partners the issues 
of environmental harm and the slow violence 
to their neighborhoods are lived experiences. 
They are a part of generations of racialized 
environmental trauma, and the impact to their 
communities’ social, physical, and financial health 
is personal. Finally, the difference is also often 
about epistemology, paradigms, and assumptions. 
The university-trained faculty and students are 
prepared to frame a problem (hopefully one that is 
relevant to the community), design a methodology, 
collect data, analyze the data, and share the results. 
While that research paradigm has its merits, it also 
frames the entire enterprise in terms of a problem. 
It leaves little room to celebrate community 
agency, resilience, and creative problem solving. 
It often also leaves little space for deep listening to 
understand the concerns and perspectives, the joys 
and curiosities, the hopes and fears of community 
members. The objectivity and rationality that is 
the scholarly mode of being can be crippling in 
a project that hinges on building empathy and 
centering community voices. It also often privileges 
the observable, material, and tangible, and fails 
to account for the intangible heritage of lived 

experiences and oral traditions. It often focuses 
on objects and outputs, and fails to attend to the 
relationships and social capital that are central 
concerns of the community.

RIVERSIDE NEIGHBORHOOD
The Riverside neighborhood is on the Near 
Westside of Indianapolis bounded on the north 
by 30th Street and the south by 16th Street, 
to the west by the White River and to the east 
by West Street/MLK. It has many attractive 
features including Riverside Park (Fig. 1), historic 
architecture, and a landscape design plan dating 
to the early 20th century in keeping with the City 
Beautiful urban planning principles. 

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Fig. 2. Burdsal Parkway Photo by Marc Ancel, 2017, cour-
tesy of The Cultural Landscape Foundation Fig. 1. 
Postcard view of the 30th Street bridge over the White 
River and part of the Riverside Park landscape design 
Courtesy of E. Kryder-Reid

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the physical, mental, and economic well-being 
of the community. The community has also 
faced an information gap where data was scarce, 
hard to locate, and sometimes wrong. Activists 
have long worked to improve the quality of life 
in the neighborhood, but faced barriers in the 
form of policies (e.g. Red Lining (Fig. 4), zoning 
variances, disinvestment in public services such 
as street lights and sidewalks) and practices (e.g. 
absentee landlords, illegal dumping) (Schwier and 
Elliott 2014). Features such as the Central Canal 
that were developed into recreational amenities 
in other parts of the city were in the Riverside 
neighborhood minimally maintained or restricted 
from use by residents. 

35 VO L .  3,  I S S U E  1

Fig. 3. Map of Site 0153 showing locations of potential 
responsible parties for the source of the groundwater 
contamination Courtesy of IDEM

Portions of the design, including Burdsal Parkway 
(Fig. 2), a wide east-west boulevard designed by 
George E. Kessler (1909) with a central median 
planted with grass and mature shade trees, 
contribute to the Riverside Drive Historic District. 
While primarily residential with a long-standing 
African-American community, the neighborhood 
also has a history of industrial and commercial 
sites, particularly along the Central Canal and the 
southeast area along 16th Street and Montcalm. 
The combination of industrial sites, dry cleaners, 
gas stations, the railroad, and the I65 Interstate 
(completed in 1976) have created a superfund-
eligible groundwater contamination site (Site 
0153), and left a legacy of environmental burdens 
that current residents now bear (Fig. 3). 

Running the gamut from groundwater 
contamination in subsurface waters to lead in soils 
and dust and paint to air pollution from highways 
and industry, these environmental insults harm 

Fig. 4. Riverside Neighborhood, detail of the 1937 Home 
Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) map indicating in red 
the areas that were at “high risk” for loans based on the 
residents’ demographics and excluding areas with Afri-
can-Americans from eligibility for government loans.

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PROJECTS
In the face of these challenges, IUPUI faculty, 
students, and community members have partnered 
on multiple projects to document the history of 
environmental harms, assess exposure and risk of 
residents’ exposomes, share information in ways 
that are accessible and relevant for residents, and 
create public humanities projects that share the 
history of the area and create broader awareness 
of the environmental issues and the systemic 
environmental racism that has exacerbated them. 
The work supports the agency and activism of 
the community members, particularly as they 
face pressures of gentrification and university 
encroachment with the planned 16 Tech project 
expansion. We share two of these projects as 
case studies to offer insights into community-
collaborative environmental justice research.

Case Study 1: Lead Exposure

The Center for Urban Health at IUPUI has a long 
history of conducting community-driven work in 
identifying and eradicating sources of the harmful 
toxin lead in the environment, and thus improving 
community health. This work has largely focused 
on soil-based risks, as much of the lead used in the 
20th century in leaded gasoline, lead-based paints, 
and emitted from industrial sources accumulated 
and concentrated in surface soils. More recently, 
the Center has built on the citizen-science 
approaches, in which data is collected by members 
of the public, by adding indoor dust measurements 
to its toolkit of exposure monitoring resources, 
and in 2021 added indoor tap water as another 
indicator. Collectively the science, educational, 
and outreach aspects of these efforts have been 
captured in the global citizen-science platform 
www.MapMyEnvironment.com. This resource is 
a “one-stop shop” for exploring community-based 
work on the human environmental exposome, and 
is meant to be adaptable and scale-able to continue 

adding new functions and layers as more results 
and more indicators come into play.

Barriers to participation in such a program 
includes (1) a community member’s knowledge of 
this resource, (2) overcoming the “participation 
cost” which often includes materials and postage, 
and (3) concerns about liability and anonymity 
of home-based environmental data. To overcome 
some of those barriers, the Center for Urban Health 
partnered with the IUPUI Arts and Humanities 
Institute (IAHI) and a local collaboration of 
congregations under the Ministerium to conduct 
a unique and highly geographically focused 
project to educate on hazards, distribute and 
collect kits from participants, and deliver results 
back to participants in an anonymous manner. In 
this current partnership, the Ministerium plays 
a central role as the public face of the program, 
and the university partners play the role of kit 
development, analytical services, and research 
translation. 

This “community-forward” approach was 
successfully carried out in an earlier partnership 
between the Center for Urban Health and 
Groundwork Indy, focusing on soil lead hazards 
in the Riverside neighborhood of Indianapolis. 
This partnership involved the Center for Urban 
Health augmenting the normal youth leadership 
development programs at Groundwork by funding 
several additional youth as “Environmental 
Justice Fellows” and educating a cohort of the 
students as lead experts. This involved providing 
some background information about lead and 
lead in their community, introducing them to the 
university and the laboratory where the analyses 
would be conducted, an eye-opening experience 
for those who had not set foot on a college campus 
before. The cohort also gathered to discuss 
how they were going to implement detailed soil 
sampling efforts. The youth then became the leads 

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of the program, discussing with residents what 
they were trying to do, conducting sampling of 
occupied and vacant properties, collecting the 
samples centrally, and then translating-relaying 
results back to occupants and answering questions 
(Figs. 5, 6). Groundwork Indy executive director 
Phyllis Boyd explained that part of the goal for the 
youth participants is to help them see themselves 
as agents of change. Working as part of the “Green 
Team” engages them “in the process of how you 
think and dream about spaces and how you can 
change them ... so they get to see the whole arc 
of how you as a person can do stuff in the 
world” (Boyd quoted in Yousry 2021). 

Two revelations emerged from this program, 
exemplifying the importance of community 
participants having leadership and agency 
in citizen science projects. The first involved 
recruitment. Many residents were wary of anyone 
knocking on their door and asking about their 
property, as they had been victims of predatory real 
estate agents and other unsolicited visitors. The 

youth decided it was going to be more efficient to 
make a door hanger explaining the program and 
providing a contact number for the residents to call 
should they want to participate. The youth then 
went to those homes wearing Groundwork Indy 
shirts and a program badge, and had few problems 
with the sampling.

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Fig. 5, 6. Youth members of the Keep Indianapolis Beautiful Green Tree Team and IUPUI students sampling soils at 
the JVT Park in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood of Indianapolis for lead analysis.

Many residents were 
wary of anyone knocking 

on their door and asking about 
their property, as they had been 

victims of predatory real estate agents 
and other unsolicited visitors. 

The youth decided it was going to be 
more efficient to make a door hanger 
explaining the program and providing a 
contact number for the residents to 
call should they want to participate.

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The second revelation involved unlicensed day care 
settings. In some of the introductory discussions, 
Center for Urban Health staff noted that many 
of the residents would likely have high soil lead 
values, and given the risk to children of lead 
poisoning, that day care centers were a particular 
concern. But because many day care centers in the 
area were unlicensed, they did not have soil lead 
testing and thus could pose risks to the children. 
Furthermore, Center staff noted that soil lead was 
typically a very easy problem to solve if you know 
it’s an issue, as an intervention as simple as adding 
a thick layer of mulch solves the soil exposure 
problem immediately. The youth took these kernels 
of information, and, unbeknownst to Center 
staff, devised an incredibly creative solution. 
Groundwork had trucks and the ability to provide 
free mulch, so the youth held beautification days, 
where they approached the day cares and offered 
to do landscaping, including adding thick mulch 
in and around outdoor playgrounds. All of the day 
cares approached were thrilled about this, and 
the youth coordinated the “capping and covering” 
of properties, without even mentioning the word 
“lead” to the day care facilities. In a perfect world, 
the facilities would be aware of and have already 
protected children in their care from lead exposure, 
but in a practical world the Groundwork youth 
managed an intervention that Center for Urban 
Health staff never would have considered, given 
their focus on the science side of the problem 
rather than the solutions side.

Case Study 2:  
Climates of Inequality

From 2017-2021 IUPUI faculty and students in 
Museum Studies and Public History, along with 
Kheprw Institute (KI) and other community part-
ners, had a remarkable opportunity to collaborate 
on a project focused on environmental justice in 
Indianapolis’ urban core. 1 Together, we investi-
gated the history of the city's public waterways to 
develop a range of environmental humanities proj-
ects designed to engage broad publics in the history 
of environmental harm and its effects on the cities’ 
neighborhoods, particularly communities of color 
and lower socio-economic status. In three classes 
over three semesters, students worked with KI to 
develop research briefs, exhibits, digital humanities 
projects, social media, and public programs. (Cli-
mates of Inequality; Indy Environmental Justice 
History, Indy Environmental Justice History Face-
book page, Toxic Heritage - Climates of Inequality 
project). KI team members were an integral part of 
the project (Fig. 7). 

38

1   Kheprw Institute (KI) is a nonprofit organization focused on empowering youth and building community wealth in Indianapolis. Since 
2003, KI has worked to create a more just, equitable, human-centered world by nurturing youth and young adults to be leaders, critical 
thinkers and doers who see the people in any community as the most valuable assets and are committed to working with disinvested 
communities to bring about change that leads to empowered self-reliant and self-determining communities. For a more complete dis-
cussion of the COI project, see Kryder-Reid, Holzman, Nadaraj, and Humphrey, in press.

Fig. 7. IUPUI students, faculty, and KI leaders meet at 
KI in Fall 2018 for a conversation about KI’s 
environmental justice work and the principles of Just 
Transition.

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They attended most of the classes, served as EJ 
subject experts, hosted community conversations, 
and led classes introducing students to the prin-
ciples of Just Transition (Climate Justice Alliance 
2016). They critiqued students’ presentations 
of their research and project concepts, and they 
coached the students on engaging community or-
ganizations. They helped students identify people 
in the community to approach as informants and 
they filmed oral histories. KI also helped promote 
the public humanities projects by hosting a show-
case of the digital humanities projects in 2018 (Fig. 
8), promoting public programs, and speaking at the 
Climates of Inequality exhibit opening celebration 
(Fig. 9).

The project exemplifies some of the benefits and 
challenges of community-engaged teaching and 
research, particularly when focusing on issues 
of environmental justice. From the students’ 
perspective, the learning experience was powerful 

because they were co-curating narratives with 
partners from KI and developing public-facing 
interpretive projects that spoke to pressing social 
issues. 

39 VO L .  3,  I S S U E  1

Fig. 8. Community members gathered at KI to see the presentation of the Climates of Inequality digital 
humanities projects developed by IUPUI students in Fall 2018.

Fig. 9. Aghilah Nadaraj and Leah Humphrey speak at 
the opening of the Climates of Inequality exhibit at the 
Central Library, January 2020.

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A student wrote that she was excited “to see the 
project go from research to planning to finally 
execution ….The [exhibit] opening event allows 
us to see the interest that people have in this topic 
and that we are connecting with people and raising 
concerns through this work” (Fig. 10).

Students also appreciated making connections 
between the issues of environmental justice and 
their own lived experiences. For example, one 
student reflected,

"I’ve lived in the Indianapolis community for the 
past five years and prior to this course I can say I 
knew nothing of its history and issues. It made me 
recognize that it’s important to really learn about 
where you reside and call home and to not be a 
robot who drives by Fall Creek Parkway every 
Saturday and Sunday but doesn’t exert the effort it 
takes into finding out why it smells so horrible."

Other students valued the opportunity to 
build relationships with the KI team and other 
community leaders (Fig. 11), gain experience in 
community-focused collaborative projects, and 
build skills in public humanities practices (e.g. 
exhibit development, public programming, digital 
humanities).

At the same time, the ambitious scope and 
complexity of the project that was valued by some 
students was also problematic for many others 

Museum Studies students had read deeply 
about museum history and its fraught legacy of 
exploitation and appropriation. They had read 
about decolonization (Lonetree 2012) and shared 
authority (Adair, Filene and Koloski 2011). Many 
had participated in projects that seek to address 
those histories of harm and are committed to the 
goals of partnerships that are not 

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Fig. 10. Climates of Inequality exhibit, IMCPL Central Library, January 2020

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• "I think that we did not address some ethical
concerns with this project including coming
off as a university trying to be 'white saviors' 
for the community.”

• “I found it difficult to reconcile with feeling 
like I was part of an exploitative university 
process that collaborates with marginalized
community and then leaves. I did my best to
get to know the KI members as individuals
by meeting with them outside of class and
attending their Facebook Live events. I often
felt guilty during class when people, including
myself, expressed uninformed views or made 
ignorant statements. I struggled to move past
the feelings of guilt I had about how ignorant
I am to the injustices marginalized communi-
ties experience and how I never felt like I had 
enough time to build deep relationships with
community members.”

• “It was also difficult to find community mem-
bers even willing to communicate or share
their experiences.... I do not blame the com-
munity for not wanting to work with students 
from an institution that has a harmful local 
legacy, but it was still frustrating nonetheless 
because I felt as though much of the content in 
the projects I was working on came too much 
from my ‘outsider’ perspective, and didn’t 
include enough authentic community stories 
and perspectives.”

• “Dialogue is important for me, because I 
hold collaboration, not consultation as an
ethical standard for my curatorial practice
when interpreting a community’s experience.
However, this ethical standard was difficult to 
adhere to with our single-semester time con-
straint and I do not feel that we were able to
incorporate our community partner enough....
For me balancing my own ethics with expec-
tations was the most challenging part of this 
course. I did not want to approach this project 
with a “white savior” lens or by dominating 
the narrative with my own authority and 
position of power.”

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Fig. 11. Students in the research seminar tour Fall Creek 
with Mapleton Fall Creek Development Corporation CEO 
Leigh Riley Evans and Destination Fall Creek advocate 
Doug Day, Fall 2018.

merely transactional, but have the potential to be 
transformative. The gap between those goals and 
the realities of working on a course-based project 
for a semester were deeply troubling for some 
students. 

Reflecting on the experience of working with 
the Kheprw Institute to investigate the history 
of Indianapolis' urban waterways through an 
environmental justice lens, some students wrote 
about their positive experiences as they learned, 
many for the first time, about the history of 
environmental harm and its disproportionate 
impact on communities of color. Others offered 
more problematic accounts of their experiences, 
particularly their discomfort with the perceived 
power dynamics of the university-community 
collaboration and their own positionality of 
privilege as graduate students and, in most cases, 
as white people.

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Fig. 12. Students learn about the Central Canal and the Riverside neighborhood on a walking tour led by Groundwork 
Indy Executive Director, Phyllis Boyd, Fall 2018. Fig. 13. “Parachuting into Environmental Justice,” (top left) a public 
program developed by IUPUI Museum Studies students Hadia Shaikh and Sarah Shorter at Big Car Collaborative, January, 
2020.

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As painful as these comments were to read, these 
students’ reflections name many of the issues 
central to community-university collaborations 
and called into stark relief the difficulty of changing 
attitudes, let alone structures of power, through 
course-based experiences. Some students were 
inspired, but many were also discomforted or even 
paralyzed with their own privilege that they felt 
disqualified them from engaging in meaningful 
ways with community members or feeling like 
voyeurs on walking tours through affected 
communities (Fig. 12). The experience left many 
of the students with troubling questions about the 
possibilities of environmental humanities to affect 
real and lasting change.

In spite of these concerns, for some Museum 
Studies students, the project helped to shape their 
professional values in ways that may inform their 
entire careers. One student commented in a self-
reflective essay, “I want my own professional work 
to be centered around community and making 
museums into places for community to be seen 
and heard.” Another wrote that “I learned that true 
community collaboration means privileging your 
partner’s voice and that museum professionals 
must act as an avenue to amplify that voice to new 
audiences….I am not always the content expert and 
...I must defer to community voices to properly tell 
stories of social injustices….collaborative projects 
with community must be equitable and benefit the 
community partners as much as the museum” 
(Figs. 13, 14). 

Another student wrote, “One of the most valuable 
parts of the class was the opportunity to grow 
my community collaboration skills including 
deep listening, active engagement, and genuine 
commitment. These skills will be foundational for 
my professional practice when I get a museum 
job.”

For the community partners, particularly KI, the 
project produced historical and contemporary data 
as well as narratives that continue to benefit KI’s 
work as they develop curriculum, provide context 
of current environmental harm, and curate other 
storytelling projects. The companion exhibit at the 
Central Library featured a spotlight on KI’s work 
on environmental justice and two KI members 
spoke compellingly at the exhibit opening. These 
opportunities helped to raise awareness of KI’s 
longstanding advocacy for community well-being. 

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Fig. 14. "Follow the Fall Creek Flow" (left) public program 
developed by IUPUI Museum Studies student Megan Perry 
at Fort Benjamin Harrison Park, January, 2020.  

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Furthermore, the project created opportunities for 
KI youth leaders to gain professional experience 
both in collaborating with the students and faculty 
and in participating in the Humanities Action Lab 
convenings at Newark University, Rutgers (Fig. 
15).

In addition to the students’ learning outcomes and 
the benefits for the Kheprw Institute, the project 
has also spurred additional research. IUPUI 
faculty collaborated on an IAHI-funded project 
exploring the “Social and Environmental History 
of Dry Cleaning,” and the preliminary results have 
been disseminated in “Dirty Laundry” a fifteen-
tweet Twitter thread (Kryder-Reid 2020) and 
“Environment and Race” a Story Map (Kryder-
Reid et al.). Elizabeth Kryder-Reid and Paula 

Brooks, Environmental Justice Coordinator with 
the Hoosier Environmental Council, also presented 
a poster at the Society of Architectural Historians 
annual conference (and subsequently developed 
as a StoryMap) interrogating the persistence of 
environmental racism in Indianapolis. It drew 
parallels between the policies and discourse 
surrounding the construction of the combined 
sewer overflow system (CSOs) in the early 20th 
century and the site in the Riverside neighborhood 
proposed in 2018 to process gravel from the 
excavations for the replacement to the CSOs. 

Working with Ms. Brooks and other community 
partners on these research projects has raised 
concerns similar to those expressed by students 
in the Climates of Inequality courses. While there 

44

Fig. 15. Dr. Laura Holzman (IUPUI), Alisha Baginski (IUPUI), and Keenan Rhodes (Kheprw Institute) (right) attend the 
convening and exhibit opening of Climates of Inequality at Rutgers, Newark, October 2019.

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was benefit in conducting historical research and 
disseminating the results, it didn’t minimize the 
University’s past and ongoing harm related to the 
establishment of the IUPUI campus, the expansion 
into nearby neighborhoods, and the current 
development of Indiana Avenue and 16 Tech 
(Paschall 2020). In this time of racial reckoning, 
the University has made some gestures of 
atonement in the form of scholarships for displaced 
residents. Ms. Brooks, a third-generation resident 
of the adjoining Near Westside neighborhood most 
impacted by the university expansion, pointed out, 
however, that there was no apparent input from 
the people or the neighbors who were harmed. 
Despite the good intentions of such initiatives, 
the University has continued investing directly in 
development that is compounding the problematic 
impact on historical residents of the Near Westside, 
namely hostile architecture, disrupted connectivity, 
dangerous sidewalks and crossings, and increased 
traffic with its higher airborne particulate pollution 
as well as congestion and parking issues. 

The project raised significant questions for faculty 
roles in community-engaged environmental justice 
work as well. In a conversation among the authors 
about the complex and often contested power 
dynamics of university-community collaborations, 
a community partner referred to the “four 
horsemen of gentrification.”  Although seemingly 
flip, the comment called into question the roles 
the faculty were playing in these community 
collaborations focused on environmental justice. 
Were faculty complicit in the displacement and 
gentrification that communities were battling, 
despite the best intentioned citizen-science 
and purportedly activist scholarship? Were 
faculty merely documenting the historical and 
contemporary harm of environmental racism, 
inequity, and injustice, or were they working 
toward reparative and restorative justice? Or 
more troubling, by training a scholarly lens on 

environmental justice issues were faculty mounting 
one of the horsemen of gentrification, along with 
urban planners and landscape architects, to 
create an intellectually cohesive but aestheticized 
narrative that continued to marginalize or 
erase the real concerns of residents? How were 
faculty acknowledging the responsible people 
and institutions, along with the systemic forces 
that created the conditions, including the role of 
the University? Were faculty just narrating the 
history, or taking action to address the harm and 
create real, enduring change? There are no simple 
answers, and faculty and students must continue to 
bring critical and self-reflective lenses to this work 
(Shah 2020, Warren-Gordon 2021).

Reflections on Community Engaged 
EJ Research and Teaching

These two case studies exemplify the value of a 
multi-year projects with long-term shared insti-
tutional goals, the value of collaborative research 
shared in accessible formats, and the potential 
for using the city as an environmental justice 
classroom. Proponents of engaged teaching have 
suggested that long term partnerships can be more 
manageable and rewarding than short-term collab-
orations (ex. Jay 2012) and in ways that allow for 
not just tactical, but strategic goals (Feigenbaum 
2010– 2011, Mathieu 2005, 2012, Parks 2009). 
The COI project, which has taken four years in-
cluding planning and dissemination, demonstrates 
both the results of a longer-term partnership and 
the challenges of spanning multiple courses and a 
changing cohorts of students. 

The COI project in particular revealed the im-
portance of process and structure for ensuring 
successful student learning outcomes and com-
munity partner satisfaction. In many ways these 
findings are most powerfully highlighted in the 
project's shortcomings. Rachael Shah’s Rewrit-

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ENGAGE!  |  e n v i r o n m e n ta l  j u st i c e 

ing partnerships: community perspectives on 
community-based learning (2020) was published 
too late to inform the COI project, but it contains 
several concepts and resources that may be use-
ful in future community engaged courses. The 
importance of self-reflection is well documented 
as a high impact practice, but assigning a weekly 
journal entry and requiring a final essay was clearly 
not sufficient to support some students’ struggles 
to situate themselves in the project and its larger 
context of environmental justice. Shah offers an 
“openness huerisitic” which asks students to write 
a definition, provide 4 concrete examples, and offer 
a self-reflection on each of the 4 dimensions of 
openness she lays out in the “Openness: Commu-
nity Members Who Work with Graduate Students” 
chapter: open minds, open construction of self, 
open construction of others, and open hearts (Shah 
2020: 149-151).  She also provides “communi-
ty grading sheets” with a feedback form so that 
community partners can give feedback about their 
experiences working with college students. These 
tools will be valuable in future community-engaged 
pedagogy. Perhaps most significant finding for 
informing future community engaged projects is 
Shah’s concept of critical community-based epis-
temologies, or ways of knowing, which posits that 
“community partners are holders and producers of 
powerful knowledge, and these knowledges can be 
invaluable in shaping engagement collaborations.” 
(Shah 2020: 107). She argues that this epistemol-
ogy should both inform the “ethical vision that ac-
knowledges the importance of community member 
voices, perspectives, and priorities” (109) and the 
power dynamics so that community partners can 
hold universities accountable. 

Looking forward, there are lessons for future 
university-community collaborations on environ-
mental justice issues. The university as an insti-
tution has a specific positionality, historically and 
in contemporary power dynamics, but faculty can 

work in a somewhat different space. Their stakes 
in the documentation of environmental risks are 
distinct from corporate and governmental enti-
ties, and as such may provide more trusted results 
than those who rely on the data for profit motives. 
The university side of the collaboration brings, 
therefore, the possibility of a counternarrative to 
the received versions promulgated by government 
agencies, developers, and industrial representa-
tives. If built on trusted, authentic relationships, 
these collaborations can also help to amplify the 
narratives of community perspectives and experi-
ences, but building those relationships is not easy, 
particularly with the shadow of the university’s 
past and ongoing community harm. The enduring 
outcomes are also in question. Clearly the intent of 
those involved is to work for social good, but the 
actual results are more ambiguous. As Dan Butin 
and Daniyal Saud wrote in 2013, “what higher 
education can accomplish through community 
engagement is an open question rather than an 
obvious answer.… until and unless we carefully 
push back on what it is that community engage-
ment can do, there may be little to celebrate a 
generation from now.” (93) For those working for 
and with IUPUI, the goals of particular communi-
ty-engaged projects have to be weighed against the 
broader institutional agendas and actions of the 
institution, and that balance is precarious at best. 
In spite of these enduring structural inequalities, 
the people involved in these projects remain com-
mitted to the goals of environmental justice work 
and to the benefits of community engagement and 
collaboration. We take inspiration from reflections 
such as the student who wrote about participat-
ing in Climates of Inequality, “[it] made me feel 
that through the completion of this project, I have 
actually done something that has made a difference 
in the world.”

46

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