Case Studies

The case studies above were produced by Macalester students while taking an Environmental Justice course. These case studies not only report information about environmental or sustainability issues at our small, liberal arts college campus, they also persuasively demonstrate that social justice research practices and inquiries are necessary within your own community, especially ones in which there are mechanisms and structures of accountability. Student activism and community organizing transforms not only life on campus but the terrain of knowledge production, academic fields and research practices. Some of the case studies include a set of recommendations to the Macalester Administration and community. We hope that these recommendations will encourage and support readers to reflect upon their current practices and provide opportunities for them to deepen their engagement and activism with environmental justice issues at Macalester and beyond.  

Each of these research projects contends with the dynamics of race, Indigeneity, power, access, and the environment. While much of this research is centered on campus, they reach beyond tracing the web of relations and persuasively demonstrates that it does not in fact exist as a self-contained or isolated "bubble" within the Twin Cities Metro area. The history of the institution and the larger neighborhood as part of the larger and ongoing structures of violence--such as Indigenous exile and racially exclusionary housing covenants--in place-making, particularly the rise of the city and the establishment of Minnesota. The desecration and removal of Indigenous remains and ceremonial belongings for the sake of scientific inquiry has indelibly shaped the violent legacy of academic knowledge production. This is not only true writ large but through the actions of Edward Neill, founder and professor of Macalester College, at what is now known as Indian Mounds Regional Park. These case studies demonstrate that to understand environmental inequity and racism we might first begin with where we are at, in our communities, and contending with these histories so that we might make urgent and necessary changes in the present and for the future.