Baltimore’s residents of color are twice as likely as white residents to develop cancer from toxic exposure, and suffer some of the highest asthma hospitalization rates in the country. Many of the city’s most polluting facilities are clustered in the predominantly Black, brown, and poor neighborhoods of South Baltimore, where residents live adjacent to dozens of sources of industrial air pollution. In the 2022-23 academic year, the two of us focused on these issues in an environmental justice workshop we taught together at Johns Hopkins University, collaborating as an anthropologist at Johns Hopkins (Anand Pandian) and a community organizer with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust (SBCLT) (Shashawnda Campbell).

We developed a syllabus that included readings on racial and environmental justice, activist reports, accounts by investigative journalists, and public narratives and testimonies. Rather than teaching from a university classroom, we met each week at the Curtis Bay Recreation Center in South Baltimore for class discussions, conversations with local residents, and community-based work. Our projects over the year followed from priorities set by SBCLT, such as storymaps making the case for the environmental and social damage wrought by the CSX coal terminal in South Baltimore. We developed projects iteratively, through conversations with community members and presentations at the recreation center.

The exchange below was edited from a recorded conversation we had about the class in early 2024. In what follows, the two of us think together about the environmental justice workshop: how we worked against the spatial enclosure of university classrooms and campuses, how we worked together as teachers and organizers, our efforts to share knowledge and authority more equitably, and our commitment to foster a space that fosters justice and accountability.

An Activist Academic Partnership

Anand Pandian (AP): So we took this leap and taught a class together over an entire year. You’re an activist. You have plenty of other things to do. Why did you think this was worth doing?

Shashawnda Campbell (SC): I think it’s worth partnering with organizations that have a different kind of power than what we have on the ground. As a professor and an organizer, we were using the powers that both of us brought into that space, advancing the same goal. We came together to work collectively on issues that were harmful to all of us in Baltimore City. It was worth it to figure out how to use that space to work with community residents on what they wanted to see, using the skills we had in the room.

AP: That reminds me of why I wanted to try this in the first place. A lot of teaching in universities is about social justice. People come into the university with these concerns. We’d like to see social change in the world. But we’re locked inside these classrooms. The problems that we talk about in university settings, we imagine them happening somewhere else, to other people far away. We try to understand them in an abstract and detached way. It’s so difficult to get a real sense of the lived experience, the lived complexity of these issues. And sometimes we wind up with really simplistic ideas about them, because we’re not confronting that reality firsthand.

SC: I think this class went across that boundary. We didn’t just study environmental justice. We went and talked with people. We went to rallies with them. We stood on the front line with them. And it’s so different when you’re doing that work. We heard real stories, talked to real people who are fighting for their lives. Even just going to Curtis Bay, feeling the air there, thinking, “Oh my God, I can’t breathe here, I don’t know what’s happening to my nose”: That experience made it real. You can’t find that in a textbook.

AP: I think that some of the things we did were real departures from the way we imagine what it means to teach or study in a university like mine. We didn’t interact as a teacher and a community partner. You and I were instructors, together. Our classroom wasn’t a space that was safely locked away from the rest of the world. We were out there in the environment we were trying to understand. We felt it with all our senses. We knocked on doors and helped to organize meetings and rallies. We read and absorbed and learned from all the elements that keep a movement in motion. And the work that students did wasn’t just for the instructors. Every project that students were involved with was intended for a wider public. That video we produced together on the history of industrial accidents in Curtis Bay—we even screened it for the leadership of the Maryland Department of the Environment. It’s pretty powerful, the idea that you’re making something in a class that has a life in the world.

SC: People in the community are grateful for that video. And we’re building community through these real-life partnerships with people. As much as we talk about the heavy burden of these industries in South Baltimore, that air pollution is hurting all of us. We’re all breathing it in. All our lives are at risk, even in the bubble of Johns Hopkins University. Hopkins is like a big beast in Baltimore City. A lot of people blame the institution for helping to build this system. When I told people I was teaching this course at Hopkins, I didn’t know how they’d respond. It’s hard to build that trust. “You gotta remember to hold them accountable,” they told me. But we could also think about the leverage we had by doing this work as part of the university.

AP: The year before, we’d started with a more conventional setup. We had instructors like me inside the university, and we had you and others outside as community experts who would come in occasionally to talk to the class. We’d invite you to speak on behalf of the community, and you were very good-natured about it, but it put you in an uncomfortable situation and it limited the kind of learning that can happen. The next year we structured it as more of a collaborative arrangement from the very outset: constructing the class together, doing all the planning together, teaching the class together. It really stretched what I was used to doing as a professor. How about for you, as an activist? Did you find yourself doing things differently because of this collaboration?

SC: When we first started, I thought to myself, “You gotta step out of this activist person and figure out what it’s like to be a professor.” But then when I got into the classroom, I realized that I would be teaching my own skills, that’s what I brought to the table, that’s how I’d engage these students. I’m a very hands-on person—let’s do this, let’s do that. The class also helped me collect my thoughts, think through things more. I always look at things as a dynamic of power: How much power do you hold in a space, how much power does the work that we're doing have? And again, going back to Hopkins, it also challenged me to think about that space. I wasn’t just coming in as a community person who would tell the class something, and then go. We were in that space together, building power together, rather than leveraging power over each other. That power dynamic shifted. We were studying together, learning together, and then actually taking action together.

AP: I hear you saying something that I hadn’t realized until just now. Maybe the class was meaningful for you because it gave you a chance to stop and explore questions that you don’t always have the space to take up. There’s something about the activist pace—you’ve gotta keep racing, you’ve gotta somehow just try to stay ahead of things. But sometimes you need room to stop and think and work things out in a more open manner.

SC: Absolutely. We’re always reacting. The problem is always changing. There’s always some other issue. And it’s really hard, because it’s fast-paced, all the time. In this class, we were on the timeline of what was happening in the community. We were matching that urgency. But it wasn’t just about the next fight. We took the time to figure out what deliverables would be really meaningful for people dealing with urgent problems and issues. We had the space to bounce ideas off each other, to think through things: what made sense, what didn’t make sense. Then we took them back to the community to see what people thought. I think it was really good to have that space.

AP: In some ways, for me, it was almost the opposite challenge, as a professor. We hang back and take all the time in the world to figure out what what we think is worth saying. But in the meantime, the world keeps changing, things move ahead, and we’re out of sync with what’s happening. Teaching with you, working with community struggles as they were unfolding in real time—it made me change my own pace of things. I had to be willing to learn and evolve and adapt on the fly, walking into class with one idea and then discovering things were suddenly so different, having to pivot on the spot and learn to do something completely different. Everything was so improvisational. But there’s also a value in that, learning how to respond to things as they change.

SC: Because I’d come back and report what just happened, and then we’d have to do something a little different! Just acknowledging those structures of power is really hard. There are so many policies that protect industry, not people. Communities are fighting back. But they’re facing these big monsters that’ve been around for a long time. The students really recognized that, what it actually feels like to go up against them.

AP: Many of these students were with us for nearly a year. Did you notice any changes in them? What do you think the experience was like for them?

SC: To be honest, I think that some of them were scared as hell, when we first started. The reality hit them. Some of them had already worked on these issues. But it’s so different when you’re organizing on the ground. People here are doing whatever they need to do to survive. You do have crime. And you’re battling all these issues, because people aren’t being treated like they’re human beings. You have an environment that’s literally killing them. And they’re doing whatever they can to get by. It’s so hard to tell students to come and work with us on environmental justice when all this is happening. But I could see the growth in the students. They stuck around. Their commitment to the class became a commitment to the issues.

AP: There’s an interesting parallel that’s coming into focus for me. We have these two sides: an educational institution, and an activist organization. In some ways, of course, we occupy different worlds. But there’s an activist impulse inside academia, a social justice commitment. And the movement also has a space for education. There are structures and situations that have to be understood differently, there are actors that we need to make better sense of—all the work we did on CSX, for example, tracing out connections, relationships, networks, developing a public resource about the coal pier, these forms of knowledge are absolutely essential to effective activist work. We actually need each other, our two worlds. That’s one thing I’ve learned from this experience.

SC: Did this class challenge your perception of what it means to be in academia, or an anthropologist?

AP: It’s a great question. The classic idea of a field like anthropology is studying people somewhere else, making sense of some other place. This class was a real wake-up call for me. Did I really understand the city I lived in? Did I actually know where I lived? What did it mean to be a professor at Johns Hopkins? It was only when I started doing this kind of community-based teaching that I had to confront the terrible reputation the institution has with so many people in the city. There’s a way we talk in anthropology about learning from other people, centering their voices. In practice, we do this selectively: There are certain voices we tend to elevate, certain communities we give that kind of attention. This experience was a chance to do this in a different, and frankly more radical, way. I had to learn how to be an activist anthropologist of the city where I lived. It’s totally changed how I think about what I do for a living.

SC: A lot of the professors we work with are anthropologists. And at first, I thought, “They're here to study me!” But I really do think it’s been different. We’ve been talking about who’s being acknowledged in these spaces: who’s being spoken to, and who’s just being spoken about. In whose voice are these stories being told? Is it the voice of the residents, or is it an academic voice that’s just speaking to other academics? How do we bridge that gap to speak to the whole audience? Because all of us are a part of this fight. In some way or other, we can all contribute something to it. So we have to be able to speak a language that we can all understand.

AP: That’s so profound. And maybe that’s what we’ve been trying to do by teaching together like this, trying to figure out what that language could be. How do we imagine the situation in a way that everyone can understand? How do we talk about it? How do we analyze it in a way that everyone can grasp? At some level you can’t have collective action on a problem unless you agree about what it is and what is required. And you can’t get there unless you’re working actively with people who are positioned differently in the world.

SC: We talk about this a lot as grassroots organizers. Even for us, it’s really hard to step outside of our world. We know these are the issues. How do we get other people to understand what we’re saying? How do we make this problem feel urgent? If you look at successful movements, you see residents and activists working together, but also academic and government people who stand with them. That’s what makes movements successful: You have all these different people who can talk to each other.

AP: There are real consequences when the lines are drawn, when you put researchers on one side and communities on the other. For movements to be successful, you need to get people out of the boxes they’ve been put in. You need knowledge that’s relevant to particular struggles and situations. The authority of community knowledge also needs to be recognized and validated. Do you think that experiments like ours can help with that?

SC: Absolutely, because they put everyone on the same level. That’s why I hate the word expert. It’s like they have the power, that there’s a hierarchy and we’re at the bottom. We have to see ourselves on the same ground. We have to eliminate that hierarchy that we see so often. And as you know, we do a lot of research now at the land trust. We try to dive into that work ourselves, even with high school students doing the research.

AP: What do you think people could take away from what we did together? If they’re academics, should they go and find activists to partner with in this way?

SC: I think what we’re really asking people to do is step out on a limb—from both sides. Trust has been broken in the past. But that doesn’t mean the relationship between academics and activists is beyond repair. To move forward, we have to acknowledge the harm that’s been done and take real steps to address it. Many institutions, even if unintentionally, have been complicit in the systems that harm environmental justice communities. Recognizing that complicity is just the beginning. Coming into communities shouldn’t be just to study them, but to stand and fight alongside them, whether that’s through a march, a rally, or any other kind of collective action. This work isn’t just about finding a community partner. It’s about showing empathy, building trust, sharing power, strategizing together—and sometimes it simply just means sharing a meal. If you’re not willing to engage in that kind of relationship, then maybe it’s best not to engage environmental justice communities at all.

AP: People in the United States right now often find it really difficult to talk to people who aren’t like them. There’s a real sense of fear and anxiety around talking to people who don’t share the same experiences, or the same space. There are reasons to be worried. The world is complicated and difficult, and all kinds of crazy things are happening. But unless we take those risks, I don’t know if anything will ever change.

SC: When you have more people at the table, you have more minds working on the same issue. You have all these different pathways opening up for so much more to happen. We’re not doing the movement any justice when we stay in our silos. That’s how we’ve been divided for so long, and the city loves that. If we’re fighting with each other, no one’s fighting with them. But when we have institutions saying the same thing that we’re saying, we have more power. We can get a lot of things changed. I believe the way that our class worked together, side by side, was a strong example of what that kind of partnership can look like in action.