Reciprocity in Community-Engaged Food and Environmental Justice Scholarship

Reciprocity in Community-Engaged Food and Environmental Justice Scholarship Dawn S. Opel (bio) and Donnie Johnson Sackey (bio) Reciprocity as a Guiding Principle for Community-Engaged Research For more than two decades, scholars in rhetoric, composition, and community literacy studies have consistently argued that reciprocity is key to successful and equitable university-community partnerships (e.g., Cushman; Cushman and Monberg; Grabill; Simmons and Grabill; Takayoshi and Powell; Remley). Their scholarship asks us to establish networks of reciprocity via a self-reflexive rhetoric that includes: 1). a reconsideration of how we define and categorize oppression before we enter communities; 2). a recognition of how we gain access to the lives of people outside universities; 3). a commitment to reciprocity, which necessitates the involvement of community partners in the interpretation of data and in how we tell stories that are not our own; and 4). an emphasis on scholarly activism, or commitment to effectuating change. This special issue seeks to expand the conversation of what reciprocity is or could be, and what it looks and feels like, from the perspective of both researchers and community members. On Food and Environmental Justice Research, Advocacy and Activism Environmental and food justice research documents and addresses the dimensions of social inequality across ethnicity, gender, age, class, and national origin. This research has primarily focused on food security, resource depletion, the siting of toxic industries, and climate change as they affect poor and working-class communities, especially communities of color, which often bear the disparate impacts of social inequality. Universities have engaged in partnerships with communities to address this inequality with varying approaches and degrees of impact. Across the disciplines, academics have traditionally defined approaches to issues of equity through the lens of procedural justice (Schlosberg 4). For example, zoning decisions for noxious industries or even policies to combat food insecurity are made by predominantly privileged white officials who are unlikely to bear the negative impacts of their decision-making (Maantay 1038). A corrective has been to make stakeholders an integral part of the planning process, a critical component of the design of reciprocal university-community [End Page 1] partnerships. Nevertheless, increasing community participation is easier said than done. Lack of technical expertise, time constraints, and divergent commitments make meaningful participation difficult to achieve. There are a variety of variables upon which successful partnerships rely. In this moment, we focus on reciprocity as a concept that requires deep consideration in order to address social inequality meaningfully. What notions of reciprocity guide "successful" partnerships around food and environmental justice? What can community organizations teach us about how we as researchers engage with them to address food and environmental justice issues? This special issue builds upon conversations initiated at the 2017 Conference on Community Writing's Food and Environmental Justice Deep Think Tank (DTT). That meeting used reciprocity as an organizing principle to facilitate discussion that could allow participants to better understand the various relationships that comprise community-engaged projects (e.g., academic institutions, community-based organizations, non-human agents) and the material contexts in which these relationships exist. Ultimately, the goal of the dialogue was to orient those new to food and environmental justice to an array of environmental justice and food justice community-engaged research projects that offered different models of reciprocity. The concerns of the DTT vis-à-vis reciprocity match our efforts with respect to designing this special issue. For example, what is the nature of academic research and how does it contribute to the overall mission of work happening in non-profit organizations? Even seemingly progressive models of reciprocity emerge from a western rationalist foundation that still privileges academic notions of justice and balance that might be inconsistent with community beliefs and needs (see Vermeylen). Our questioning of reciprocity implores that we revise or even abandon accepted notions of partnership and participation in community-engaged scholarship. This might also mean focusing upon not only how reciprocity happens but also what kind of research benefits community organizations. Sometimes this entails reconsidering our definitions of responsibility. For example, whose responsibility is it to "translate" or code switch, or learn a new language? Whose responsibility is it to initiate the research process and design research questions? Who...

Economic Justice · Environmental ethics · Environmental justice · Political science · Public relations · Reciprocity (cultural anthropology) · Reflexivity · Rhetoric · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Social Media and Politics

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