"Most important of all, what shall we do?"
Launching a new study with a community in eastern Washington
As a PhD student, one of my committee members posed this question to me for my comprehensive exam:
What does it mean to practice community-engaged research? What are the essential principles and practices that generally guide this type of research? … Provide a rationale for why you have chosen a community-engaged approach … Describe the core principles and practices that you draw on most heavily for this work. Finally, describe any ethical tensions or dilemmas that may emerge in your research and how you would work to resolve them.
This wasn’t the “hardest” question I got — that was one about oxidation of 2-methylisoborneol by hydroxyl radicals during ozonation, which I’m still not sure I got right — but it was certainly the most delicate. By that I mean, I couldn’t just charge my way into equations and graphs to demonstrate my knowledge; I had to slow down, hold the question carefully, and with respect. I felt a certain responsibility to the question for the communities I was trying to serve.
The question was also a bit of a gut punch because I had recently returned from two years of community-based work in Bolivia where all I did was wrestle with these questions. And I admit I still wasn’t sure. I was (and still am) haunted by the words of Wendell Berry from a 1991 Atlantic essay: “When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of … a person willing to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem.” In fact, I was even less sure about how to do this after returning to the U.S. (How do you go “down and down” into a problem, when the academic path feels more like a ladder to climb up and up?)
Anyway, I recalled this question from my comps recently because of a new project that is challenging me again to think hard about how make research work for communities on the ground. Recently, my group was awarded a grant to work with a community in the West Plains of Washington to study the effectiveness of household water filters for PFAS in private well water. I previously wrote about a visit to the area and the PFAS issue there. On a pre-dawn drive back to the airport at the end of that trip, John Hancock, the founder of the West Plains Water Coalition, filled my head with ways we could work together to answer his neighbors’ questions about water filters and PFAS.
I took John up on the challenge and, together, we responded to an RFP from the Water Quality Research Foundation. You can read announcements about the study here and here. But as great as it is to celebrate receiving a grant, we’re still a ways off from answering the community’s questions. Certainly part of what it means to practice community-engaged research should be to find ways to fund it—but that’s only the starting line. I am reminded of an article I read when studying for my comps, a strange little piece by social scientist Kurt Lewin published in 1946, but containing a nugget that stuck with me. Writing about “action research” to address issues of economic and social discrimination Lewin wrote: “These eager people feel to be in the fog. They feel in the fog on three counts: 1. What is the present situation? 2. What are the dangers? 3. And most important of all, what shall we do?”
Much progress has been made on #1 and #2 regarding PFAS in the West Plains, but there is a ways to go to answer #3. There are also many right answers to how community-engaged research should be conducted—about shared agency, decision-making, representation, listening, report back and more—but if we don’t get to #3, we’ve missed the mark. As John told me recently, “[This study is] a confidence-builder for many homeowners… They don’t want a journal article, even it’s peer-reviewed. They need simple advice about what to do.”
Or, as one of the study participants in my former research in North Carolina told me when I promised a $50 Visa gift card for engaging with the study: “I don’t want a damn gift card, I want my water fixed!”
A similar story repeats itself among communities of private well users affected by PFAS nationwide. Fenceline communities near military sites, chemical manufacturers, airports, refineries, landfills and so on. And others that are not near any known industrial sources but still have PFAS in their wells from silent septic systems or long-forgotten applications of fire-fighting foam somewhere upstream. And still others completely in the dark. And they all ask — what shall we do?
I hope, with this study, to be able to give an answer.
Learn more about the West Plains PFAS Filter Study at filter.study. Subscribe to updates from the Equal Water Lab to follow our progress.