Slow Violence, Air Quality, and the Right to Breathe: Learning With and From an Intergenerational Collective Confronting Environmental Racism

• In Event: Equity, Justice, and Inclusion in Informal Learning

Abstract

How can youth and adults collectively learn about and resist the toxic pollution that acts as a daily, gradual brutality? How might an intergenerational informal learning program catalyze communities to “reflect, disseminate, and act” toward environmental justice (Morales-Doyle & Frausto, 2021)? This paper reports on the initial stages of a participatory design project established to enable affected communities to become storytellers with large-scale data both to surface and combat environmental racism, with a focus on air quality. For the purposes of this paper, we focus on the program’s initial session and train our analysis on community members’ experiences with air quality, over time, particularly in terms of issues they must navigate or forms of advocacy they must enact.

Authors

• Ty Hollett, Pennsylvania State University

• Bishara Abdul-Hamid, Pennsylvania State University