Our Mission

To co-produce, digitally archive, geographically map, and make accessible to the public historical material on the history of environmental inequality and the fight for environmental justice not only in Newark, New Jersey but also across the United States.

Our Collaborators

We are a collective of researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers University-Newark, and frontline communities.  Our collaborators include undergraduate and graduate students from the fields of history, the arts, and sciences, along with local residents, citizen researchers, and community activists from dozens of communities facing a wide variety of environmental inequalities.  Currently more than 100 collaborators have archived material on the history of environmental justice on this website.

Our Research Principles

These local community research principles were developed by students who have posted their work to this website. The principles are an on-going process, with new students examining, discussing, and updating the principles each subsequent semester.  Currently, our principles for conducting community-based environmental justice historical research includes:

• Be Collaborative: Make room for locals, other academics, and non-human actors in your research.
• Be Equitable and Inclusive: Strive for research that includes a wide variety of voices and viewpoints.
• Ask Permission and Get Consent: To undertake research and to make that research available to the public.
• Seek Community Knowledge: Avoid academic arrogance and be open to and value local community knowledge.
• Listen: To local community members, to fellow classmates, to librarians and archivists, to your own thoughts and emotions while conducting research.
• Be Transparent: About who you are, what research questions you are asking, and what the purpose is of your research.
• Be Respectful and Responsible: To those you are researching, those with whom you are researching, and those who may be affected by your research.
• Acknowledge: The work of locals, other scholars, activists, and the many others who have come before you.
• Understand Structural Inequalities: Frame your local research within broader cultural inequities involving political, economic, social, and other forms of power.
• Share Your Research: Ensure that local community members have easy and equitable access to your research materials.
• Encourage Community Review: Encourage community members to provide feedback during the research stage, and when possible include a community review process for the final research product.