Forging Connections: Environmental Justice
Francesca Majluf will deliver our inaugural talk in the “Forging Connections: Environmental Justice” seminar series on Friday, April 12th, 2PM at the Aerodyne Research home offices in Billerica, MA.
She will discuss her approach to centering community priorities in air quality research.
Francesca Majluf
Francesca spent several years at Aerodyne using and developing the Vocus PTR-ToF instrument. During that time, she travelled the country, measuring industrial pollutants, smoke from wildfires, and many other sources. She has since joined the Olin College of Engineering where she is a Research Program Manager and Adjunct Instructor for the Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship course. One of her main research interests is in the field of Environmental Justice. You can learn more about Francesca at https://www.olin.edu/bios/francesca-majluf
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Her abstract is below.
Air Partners: A Model for Centering Community Priorities in Air Justice Projects
Since its founding in 2017, the Air Partners group at Olin College of Engineering has supported over a dozen partners to conduct projects related to advancing air justice in Environmental Justice (EJ) communities in the Boston area. These organizations have spanned a wide variety of identities, including city governments, community-based nonprofits, EJ advocacy organizations, and elected officials at the city, state, and federal levels. Throughout these projects, several overarching principles have guided our work:
In this presentation we will introduce the basics of EJ, what EJ efforts are underway in the Greater Boston Area, and a roadmap that summarizes our approach to stakeholder-partnered projects, highlighting guiding questions and goals for each stage of a project. We will also share case study examples from partnered projects to highlight lessons learned over 7 years of partnering in air quality research to achieve impact.
- Continually decenter our (faculty/student/academic system) priorities in order to center community priorities
- Meaningfully involve partners in decision making about study design, implementation, outputs and endpoints
- Bias toward impact as the primary goal guiding the creation of outputs from projects
In this presentation we will introduce the basics of EJ, what EJ efforts are underway in the Greater Boston Area, and a roadmap that summarizes our approach to stakeholder-partnered projects, highlighting guiding questions and goals for each stage of a project. We will also share case study examples from partnered projects to highlight lessons learned over 7 years of partnering in air quality research to achieve impact.