Advancing Environmental Justice Research within and beyond Science and Engineering

Abstract

Scientists and engineers have historically approached questions of environmental justice (EJ) differently from social scientists and humanists, from how they formulate problem scope to how they propose solutions. While scientists and engineers have assessed distributional injustices extensively, there are opportunities for deeper interdisciplinary collaboration with other EJ schools of thought. In this Perspective, we first present an EJ schematic for a science and engineering audience, where we trace epistemologies within EJ schools to show how EJ scholars conceptualize knowledge, how this relates to their methods, and how they present and publish work. We survey the EJ literature─mainly work related to the United States─across disciplines to determine major tensions within EJ and between EJ, science, and engineering scholarship. We also discuss possibilities for enabling interdisciplinary collaboration for scientists and engineers working on EJ-related questions by analyzing epistemological compatibilities. Next, we highlight opportunities to facilitate collaboration through an illustrative interdisciplinary case study. We conclude with takeaways for scientists and engineers moving forward, alongside some of the challenges accompanying interdisciplinary EJ research.