Abstract
Excerpted From: Rebecca Bratspies, Andrea Scarborough, Riana Mehreen, Danielle Dubno-Hammer, Maida Galvez, Kiran P. Nagdeo, Luz Guel and Dawn Roberts-Semple, Community-based Research Can Be a Tool in the Fight Against Structural Racism, 41 Wisconsin International Law Journal 613 (Summer, 2024) (157 Footnotes) (Full Document)
In design theory, a wicked problem is one that has no clear solution or endpoint. Applying this notion to climate change, Yale researchers led by Ben Cashore coined the term “super-wicked problem” to reflect additional layers of complexity and indeterminacy associated with addressing the ongoing climate crisis. According to Cashore and his associates, the mark of a “super-wicked problem” is not only that it has no clear solution, but that those who are creating the problem are also the ones tasked with solving it. And because there are no clear answers, those same problem creators/solvers get to decide what “solving” means in the relevant context.
Applying these insights about wicked problems to structural racism, it becomes clear that everyone participates in perpetuating structural racism, even those struggling to name and eliminate it. This inherent contradiction is particularly problematic for researchers studying how structural racism impacts frontline communities, as well as lawyers bringing impact litigation on behalf of those frontline communities. So much scholarly work endorses the idea that social justice research and practices should not be extractive and should help build toward liberation rather than oppression. But what does it mean to take that seriously? How do we structure nonextractive interactions between academics and the vulnerable communities that too often wind up on the losing end of global extractive processes?
This Article suggests that doing nonextractive research, what some have called liberation science, involves transformation starting from the earliest stages of the research process to upend implicit hierarchies of knowledge and power. Part I of this Article explains the concept of wicked problems and documents the embedded wicked problem of structural racism. Part II focuses on decision makers like scientists and lawyers, showing how their actions are enmeshed in this wicked problem and how that reality limits the effectiveness of their actions. Part III begins to describe how we might do things differently. Drawing from medicine, public health, and law, this part offers examples of research that defies the conventional parameters of academic research and shows how research can be a tool for surfacing and addressing structural racism. Part IV concludes with some thoughts about how these principles can be incorporated into legal and medical education.
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There is a growing call for including community-focused training in a host of professions that were traditionally seen as elite and unconnected to overburdened communities. Writing about the need to confront the wicked problem of structural racism in medical training, Nicholas Kawa and his coauthors make a compelling case that “training researchers to work effectively in inclusive, transdisciplinary teams that consider both the complexities and politics of wicked problems, will lead to more sustainable and equitable outcomes, even if the problems are never permanently solved.” Among the skills they identify as essential for this process is the ability to collaborate effectively with stakeholders and team members with diverse backgrounds, life experiences, and ways of knowing. This bold recognition of the importance of teaching these skills finds an echo in the interpretation to ABA Standard 302(d), which requires law school curricula to include “other professional skills needed for competent and ethical participation as a member of the legal profession.” Specifically, Interpretation 302-1 defines “other professional skills” to include collaboration and cultural competence. In 2022, Standard 303(c) was revised to emphasize that law schools must “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” Interpretation 303-6 emphasizes the centrality of these skills to professional legal identity and to lawyers' obligation to promote a justice system that “eliminates bias, discrimination, and racism in the law.” This ABA standard builds not only on developments in the medical field, but also on a long history of legal scholars working in a wide array of fields whose writings have documented the impacts of structural racism on the legal profession. To date, these new ABA standards have not been fully fleshed out. But taking a page from medical education, the standards might be a way to inculcate awareness of “the profoundly different epistemological and ontological assumptions that stakeholders have about the problems at hand, and learning how to work across such differences in practical and equitable ways.” Specifically, this would involve a commitment to rethinking the role between lawyer and client, especially in impact litigation. Lawyers will have to be more open to collaborative processes when deciding (1) what questions get investigated, and what the research parameters will be; (2) whose voices matter in identifying possible solutions; and (3) once there is a project or a lawsuit, who has access to the data and who is an author in the resulting publications. These choices matter. The good news is that nonextractive practices actually lead to posing different questions, investigating different solutions, and sharing research through different channels.
Rebecca Bratspies is a Professor at CUNY School of Law and Director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reford.
Andrea Scarborough has fought for decades on behalf of her Southeast Queens community.
Riana Mehreen holds a master's in public health from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and is a member of the Delta Omega Honorary Society in Public Health.
Danielle Dubno-Hammer has been teaching inquiry-based science in New York City public schools for almost two decades.
Dr. Maida Galvez is a pediatrician dedicated to promoting healthy environments for all children. She is Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Climate Science and the Department of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dr. Kiran Nagdeo is a dentist from India, a recent public health graduate from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and an incoming PhD in Epidemiology student at NYU School of Global Public Health.
Luz Guel Salazar (they/them) is the Director of Community Engagement & Environmental Justice at the Center on Health and Environment Across the LifeSpan (HEALS) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dr. Dawn Roberts-Semple is an environmental science professor at CUNY - York College. She researches air pollution characterization and local climate change with a focus on the meteorological impacts on particle- and gas-phase air pollutant concentrations, and their cumulative effects on respiratory health.
