Appalachian Studies, Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Mar 5;17(5):1695. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17051695.
This article describes a collaboration among a group of university faculty, undergraduate students, local governments, local residents, and U.S. Army staff to address long-standing concerns about the environmental health effects of an Army ammunition plant. The authors describe community-responsive scientific pilot studies that examined potential environmental contamination and a related undergraduate research course that documented residents' concerns, contextualized those concerns, and developed recommendations. We make a case for the value of resource-intensive university-community partnerships that promote the production of knowledge through collaborations across disciplinary paradigms (natural/physical sciences, social sciences, health sciences, and humanities) in response to questions raised by local residents. Our experience also suggests that enacting this type of research through a university class may help promote researchers' adoption of "epistemological pluralism", and thereby facilitate the movement of a study from being "multidisciplinary" to "transdisciplinary".
本文描述了一群大学教师、本科生、地方政府、当地居民和美国陆军人员之间的合作，以解决长期以来对陆军弹药厂对环境健康影响的担忧。作者描述了社区响应的科学试点研究，这些研究检查了潜在的环境污染，以及一门相关的本科研究课程，该课程记录了居民的担忧，将这些担忧置于上下文中，并提出了建议。我们认为，资源密集型的大学-社区伙伴关系具有价值，这些关系通过跨学科范式（自然/物理科学、社会科学、健康科学和人文学科）的合作来促进知识的产生，以回应当地居民提出的问题。我们的经验还表明，通过大学课程来实施这种类型的研究可能有助于促进研究人员采用“认识论多元主义”，从而促进研究从“多学科”向“跨学科”的转变。
