By Ellen Dong
When Hurricane Matthew tore through North Carolina in 2016, the state saw 26 fatalities, more than a million residents without power, and countless buildings damaged or destroyed, according to NOAA. At the time, Darien Alexander Williams was an urban planner in the region. He witnessed firsthand that devastation doesn’t strike equitably. Given the region’s history of discrimination, marginalized communities were more likely to live in flood-prone areas and bear the brunt of the destruction.
For Williams, this experience prompted the question: “How do we rebuild after a hurricane has devastated an entire town?”
Now, as an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Social Work, Williams uses his background as both a community organizer and a climate justice researcher to promote more just outcomes in emergency management planning. Williams is also an affiliated faculty member of the Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS).
This type of planning helps communities transform after experiencing disasters, which continue to become more extreme and frequent. However, in order to rebuild towns in a way that benefits everyone, Williams says he’s had to rethink how academics work with communities.
“The role of the scientist is always being contested. In the standard model, a researcher may have good intentions but needs to simply publish a paper on the issues and keep moving on to the next thing,” Williams says. “The different model that we’re trying to build involves working more slowly over time, so there becomes a very organic interest led by people who live in that neighborhood, not just by us scientists. Research questions come out of the relationship built between us.”
“The different model that we’re trying to build involves working more slowly over time, so there becomes a very organic interest led by people who live in that neighborhood, not just by us scientists. Research questions come out of the relationship built between us.”
– Darien Alexander Williams
A recent research project, funded by the Florida Sea Grant, examines how environmental resources within Jacksonville are distributed among residents. And more recently, he received funding from the Belmont Forum and the National Science Foundation to expand this work with research teams in Vietnam, Turkey, Ecuador, and other countries.
We spoke with Williams to learn more about spatial justice, local civic engagement, and relationship-building between scientists and communities.
Q&A with Darien Alexander Williams
Can you describe your field of interest? How did you land there?
I’m trained as an urban planner, first and foremost. I like looking at the intersection of radical social movements and the built environment throughout history. I want to hear from people who’ve been excluded from making decisions about their environment and help them amass the power to do that work themselves.
Following Hurricane Matthew, when I briefly worked in disaster recovery planning in North Carolina, I saw that there were so many conflicts that were deeply rooted in local history of slavery, racial dispossession, gendered participation, and Indigenous genocide. That pushed me to want to dedicate time to understanding the past.
Can you tell us a bit more about your project in Jacksonville?
This project began when some collaborators of mine from the University of Florida wanted to explore questions around spatial justice. There’s almost nothing written about climate change affecting northern Florida, especially Jacksonville, so we began building relationships with people engaged in these questions from a non-academic standpoint.
We wanted to see if we could pull together the resources to start a rigorous, community-led, scientific study for some of these spatial justice questions in Jacksonville, relating to its environment, health systems, and history of racism. The Florida Sea Grant allowed us to dive deeply into these questions and build relationships with these community partners over a long period of time.
What were some of your research goals for this project?
The process is sort of the goal. Connecting with different groups that hadn’t been connected with before, encouraging researchers to pay more civic attention, and getting the local city council to start prioritizing neighborhoods were definitely meaningful outcomes. Plus, getting more academics to show up and connect to local organizations.
There was a focus on participatory action research. We wanted to get young people and community organizations included in the scientific process to inform local policy and bring awareness to issues that they care about. And that’s produced both a lot of knowledge and publications, and benefited the community’s push toward justice and recognition.
How has this project changed from what you initially envisioned?
Recently, our team established a new project with the Belmont Forum, which supports international collaboration in climate and health projects. This pushed us to connect with teams in Vietnam, Turkey, Ecuador, Norway, and the UK to take what we thought through in Jacksonville and apply it to international contexts.
It’s a similar project in those locations, but not entirely the same. It’s not really our job as scientists to tell communities what research questions to investigate. We have to nurture relationships for years, and then have their research questions emerge from that. We’re in that nurturing phase right now. We’re interested in air quality, we’re interested in local histories, and so on, but what it looks like in the end, we have no idea.
“It’s not really our job as scientists to tell communities what research questions to investigate. We have to nurture relationships for years, and then have their research questions emerge from that.”
– Darien Alexander Williams
Do you have any advice for any aspiring researchers?
I kept in my Notes app a list of really interesting and difficult questions that arose for me during my community and urban planning work. Small questions like ‘How did this town lose control of their own infrastructure?’ ‘Why does this one immigrant enclave neighborhood exist?’
I have hundreds and hundreds of questions. It’s still my list of project ideas now. Nurture the curiosity and notice when you actually have genuine curiosity. I think that’s the most important part. Then when you apply to PhDs or other programs, it becomes clear that you are coming from a very genuine place. Programs want that, and everything else will follow.