Can academic-community partnerships be equitable? A case study of the Tar Creek Superfund Flood Map

Опубликовано: 09 Май 2024
на канале: Hudson River Watershed Alliance

Dr. Kate Meierdiercks from Siena College and Rebecca Jim from LEAD Agency shared lessons learned from a collaborative mapping project focused on flooding along the Tar Creek in northeastern Oklahoma. This presentation highlighted opportunities and limitations of equity in co-production throughout the process of building the Tar Creek Superfund and Flood map and the many ways it has been used by the community for environmental justice education, outreach, and activism and lessons learned that may have implications for academic-community partnerships in the Hudson River Watershed.

While power, technical expertise, resources, and capacity may never be equitable across teams of academic researchers and community partners, when project goals are carefully co-developed and the expertise of community partners is valued and uplifted, these partnerships can lead to equitably co-produced outcomes.

The project team designed and built an interactive flood map demonstrating how the Tar Creek Superfund site lies within the floodplain of Tar Creek. Each time it floods, floodwaters flow through the Superfund site, potentially carrying and distributing mining waste throughout the community, further exacerbating the environmental racism the community has experienced as a result of the mine.

Conventional mapping projects can limit opportunities for co-production, concentrating power with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) professionals. Yet, for this project, the GIS map helped produce greater authority, legitimacy, and autonomy for community members. The community-lead nonprofit has been able to use it in novel ways not imagined at the project's onset, recentering power and agency over the map and the story that it tells with the community.

Links shared during the presentation:
WaveMaker Awards Benefit on June 5 at the Falcon in Marlboro: https://hudsonwatershed.org/wavemaker/
Hudson River Watershed Alliance's watershed characterization technical assistance project: https://hudsonwatershed.org/watershed...
Tar Creek Superfund Flood Map: http://bit.ly/LEADfloodmap

This program is supported by funding from the Hudson River Estuary Program, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, with support from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund, in cooperation with NEIWPCC.