(WITHDRAWN) Documenting Invisible Environmental Injustice and Disasters with Youth in Nevada

Background and Purpose: Slow violence is a conceptual frame that helps understand the most impactful environmental injustices and disasters of our time: those that are hidden, accumulate over time, and disproportionately affect historically marginalized populations (Nixon, 2011). One step to resolving slow violence is to make it visible through documentation, which this study aims to do with community-based participatory research with local youth in Nevada. This project is funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service and is currently in the second year. This paper focuses on the community-based understanding and documentation of slow violence.

Methods: Photovoice is an ideal research method for empowering local populations to tell their stories (Wang, 2006) and thus this study utilized this method to document experiences of slow violence. Our photovoice team included one professor, one community partner, 17 “youth scientists” from Title 1 high schools or who are involved with Upward Bound, a population that overlaps with the historically marginalized populations that are most likely to experience slow violence, and 2 project leaders, who were youth scientists from the first year of the project. In the study, the youth scientists took pictures of slow violence in their communities and then engaged in photovoice interviews following the SHOWeD mnemonic to explain their photos. The SHOWeD interviews were transcribed verbatim and then thematically analyzed in NVivo by the PI and a research assistant; the youth scientists themed their pictures in a parallel process that supports confirmability.

Results: The youth scientists explored several problems including: climate disasters such as wildfires, infrastructure needs such as lack of waste management services, environmental injustice such as illegal dumping in working class areas, and the current and historic impacts of mining. Two sub-themes were identified in their understanding of slow violence. 1) Many of the problems were the result of several complicated connecting issues. For example, the Reno housing crisis has led to an increase in homelessness. The homeless populations live by the river, which has been increasingly flooding due to climate changes, which causes danger for these populations. 2) The problems were often related to lack of development. For example, in some working class areas of the city, there are no sidewalks and deep drainage ditches. Residents must walk in the street and accidents are common, particularly among children; this problem worsens with floods.

Conclusion and Implications: In addition to identifying local instances of slow violence, these sub-themes add to the scholarship on slow violence, disasters, and environmental justice. These problems may be more complicated than in the literature, and at the intersection of multiple problems rather than just two (environmental problem and marginalization). In addition, because many of the identified problems are related to lack of development and infrastructure, these slow violence disasters are manmade, even if the related environmental problem is natural. Social work has committed to addressing disasters and environmental problems. Identifying these problems from a local viewpoint is essential to working on solutions.