Dissertation Defence: Unintended Consequences: Environmental Health and Environmental Justice Knowledge

Stephenie Hendricks, supervised by Dr. Greg Garrard, will defend their dissertation titled “Unintended Consequences: Environmental Health and Environmental Justice Knowledge” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies – Sustainability theme.

An abstract for Stephenie Hendricks’s dissertation is included below.

Examinations are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Please email greg.garrard@ubc.ca to receive the Zoom link for this defence.

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ABSTRACT

Despite recommendations in 1999 by the Committee on Environmental Justice Health Sciences Policy Program at the U.S. Institute of Health that provided evidence for the importance of education among medical professionals, policymakers, and the public on environmental justice (EJ) and environmental health (EH) (Medicine viii), the presence of EH and EJ content within general post-secondary curriculum remains exiguous (Carlos Garibay et al. 921). While the U.S. National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences has argued that learning about EH “can facilitate students’ learning in science, math, language, history, and civics,” (Hursh et al. 2), environmental curricula for mobilizing accessible knowledge about EH and EJ for students regardless of their academic discipline is particularly absent. “Unintended Consequences: An Open Educational Resource About Environmental Health and Environmental Justice,” is an Environmental Humanities project delivering a podcast-centred post-secondary curriculum using subjective, qualitative Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) methodology for an Open Education Resources (OER) modular EH and EJ curriculum. Since SPN uses stories as data, students learn about EJ and EH through the voices of those with lived experiences in these realms, including about the complexities of EH and EJ identification and definition. Four distinct modules each contain an instructor guide, learning outcomes, key concepts, a podcast, a unique article, and curated materials. Four distinct module themes include: “A Brief and Recent History of Environmental Health,” “Health Professionals on the Front Lines,” “On the Fenceline,” and “What Instead?” (featuring Green Chemistry, alternatives chemicals assessment, just transitions, shareholder, and consumer advocacy and sustainable business). Limitations to this research include significant subjectivity throughout, a relatively small sample size, and the small scope meant as brief introductions to a variety of aspects of these very complex realms. “Unintended v Consequences” fills a gap for an urgently needed portal for accessible knowledge about manmade toxic exposures in our environment that is crucial for success for sustaining a healthy world.