Dana Elizabeth Powell

This Wenner Gren Engaged Research Grant (ERG) enabled our team to invest meaningfully in building relationships with one another but also across wider, rural communities and constituencies, to lay the foundation for environmental justice collaborative research focusing on industrialized bioenergy development in two counties in eastern North Carolina. Both sites have been long-impacted by industrialism and racial capitalism. This relationship work was foundational to establishing a new research collective: the Eastern North Carolina Environmental Justice CoLab. Our team comprised four women across two generations – one Indigenous, one African-American, two white – all with ancestral roots in the project site of eastern North Carolina and all with multiple decades of differing experience in and across environmental justice, conservation, law, self-determination, racial justice, human rights, energy justice, NGO development, and community-aligned research. The ERG enabled the social infrastructure and preliminary research necessary to establish four focus areas: (1) Toxic Tours; (2) Digital Archiving; (3) Citizen Science (especially in relation to water); and (4) innovations in “collaborative” research as critical parts of building research capacity in rural EJ communities. It has led to a number of spin-off endeavors, still underway.