Lessons from the Schuylkill River on community-engaged research
The impactful, multi-year work of the Schuylkill River & Urban Waters Research Corps provides lessons for the environmental humanities and beyond on conducting research that is responsive to community needs.
3 min. read
Image: Bethany Wiggin
A historian working on both sides of the Atlantic, Bethany Wiggin, a professor of German in the School of Arts & Sciences,is interested in how historic legacies—including pollution—shape modern landscapes and how changed landscapes impact human populations.
A decade ago, she and engineering professor Peter DeCarlo—then at Drexel University—launched the Schuylkill River & Urban Waters Research Corps, an ambitious, wide-ranging, five-year collection of community-driven projects in Philadelphia, including educational programming, grants to artists, and a 2-week research seminar involving trips to local creeks and wetlands.
“I would like us all to think more critically and more seriously about community-led, community-engaged, community-responsive research,” Wiggin says. This is especially important, she adds, as climate impacts and environmental disasters become a bigger part of daily experiences.
Remembering a ‘forgotten place’
The authors frame the tidal Schuylkill River as what sociologist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls a “forgotten place”—an area that has experienced abandonment due to the impacts of industrialization on marginalized communities.
They write that they “aimed both to make visible the river’s use as a test site for toxic practices that put racialized and vulnerable populations in ‘harm’s way’ and to show it as a place where transformative, sustaining practices can be codeveloped in and with its historic and contemporary communities.”
The paper highlights hands-on projects such as WetLand, a houseboat that provided educational programming around art and ecology in collaboration with Bartram’s Garden and artist Mary Mattingly, and the On-Water Intensive, a collaboration with Drexel and its Academy of Natural Sciences, which included research trips to the Wissahickon Creek, Fairmount Water Works, and more.
“Oral histories are perhaps the most powerful artifacts shared in the Schuylkill River archive,” Wiggin, Premoli, and Sarti write. They “have provided invaluable qualitative data that has already been put to work in a variety of settings by diverse users.”
The authors offer five lessons from their work, hoping to catalyze more academic research that is responsive to public needs:
Academic researchers are seen as representatives of their institutions.
Community collaboration operates on a different timeline than the academic calendar.
Effective collaboration requires meeting in spaces where partners feel comfortable, which often means gathering not on campus but near their workplaces or homes.
Successful collaboration relies on pursuing mutually beneficial goals. Listen more than you talk.
Compensating community partners is key for equitable and lasting collaboration.
Launching new collaborative endeavors
Wiggin has been putting these lessons into practice as she transitions to a tighter focus on energy justice, which was one aspect of the Research Corps’ work.
Graduate students worked with the Grays Ferry community in South Philadelphia on Futures Beyond Refining, a project that helped residents imagine a healthier future after growing up near the biggest crude oil refinery on the East Coast. That collaboration sparked the creation of The Community Grocer, a nonprofit and President’s Sustainability Prize recipient. The Research Corps also led to the creation of the Intersecting Energy Cultures Working Group, an international team working to understand the varied impacts of energy projects.
The working group just wound down, and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities—which Wiggin founded and directed—no longer exists, but Wiggin is working on a new collaborative project examining issues of energy justice on both sides of the Atlantic. She hopes to build on early-stage research that aims to understand how environmental advocates from Philadelphia and Chester, the Gulf Coast, and Germany are exchanging knowledge about the fossil gas infrastructure that connects lives in fracking fields downstream to export terminals and across the ocean.
The pipelines that feed liquification and gasification terminals could be repurposed for green hydrogen, she explains, so she is trying to understand the feasibility of green hydrogen projects and whether they’re replicating existing environmental harms.
Wiggin has also been working with a UNESCO coalition to teach academics how to embed policy-relevant outcomes in their research and communicate them to the public, such as through briefs and newspaper op-eds.
“We think there’s a real opportunity for amplifying collaborations,” Wiggin says, “including bringing arts- and humanities-driven methods into community engagement and collaborating with natural scientists and social scientists, to make our research responsive to community needs.”
Bethany Wiggin is a professor of German in the Department of Francophone, Italian, & Germanic Studies and founding director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Martin Premoli is an assistant professor of English at Pepperdine University and a Penn Ph.D. graduate.
Luna Sarti is an instructor in Italian at Texas Christian University and a Penn Ph.D. graduate.
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