Tajik Mansoureh, Minkler Meredith
University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA 01854, USA.
Int Q Community Health Educ. 2006;26(3):213-31. doi: 10.2190/IQ.26.3.b.
Community-university partnerships increasingly are being created to study and address environmental injustices. This article describes a case study of one such effort and its contributions to a decade-long community struggle to curb the growth of industrial hog operations and their adverse health effects in the United States' rural south. Worldwide transformation of livestock production from family farms to large-scale industrial agricultural complexes has resulted in the degradation of local environments, with negative impacts on public health. In the rural south, the concentration of industrial livestock operations has been most pronounced in low income African-American communities. Using political economy and community-based participatory research (CBPR) as a conceptual framework, this article explores the partnership between a strong community-based organization, Concerned Citizens of Tillery, and researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Public Health to study and address this problem. The political, economic, and historical context of the partnership is examined, as are the challenges faced, and the partnership's contributions to maintaining grassroots community organizing and activism and affecting local policy change. Implications for other CBPR partnerships are discussed.
社区与大学之间的合作日益增多，旨在研究和解决环境不公问题。本文描述了这样一项努力的案例研究，以及它对美国南部农村地区长达十年的社区斗争所做的贡献，这场斗争旨在遏制工业养猪场的扩张及其对健康的不利影响。全球范围内，畜牧业生产从家庭农场向大规模工业化农业综合体的转变导致了当地环境的退化，对公众健康产生了负面影响。在南部农村地区，工业牲畜养殖场在低收入非裔美国人社区最为集中。本文以政治经济学和基于社区的参与性研究（CBPR）为概念框架，探讨了一个强大的社区组织——蒂勒里关注公民组织与北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校公共卫生学院的研究人员之间为研究和解决这一问题而建立的合作关系。文中考察了该合作关系的政治、经济和历史背景，以及所面临的挑战，以及该合作关系对维持基层社区组织和行动主义以及影响地方政策变化所做的贡献。还讨论了对其他CBPR合作关系的启示。
