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This presentation describes research on developing and implementing a suite of integrated, interdisciplinary, community-engaged, anti-racism training opportunities for civil and environmental engineering undergraduates at the University of South Florida to build capacity for addressing environmental justice challenges. It is well established that communities of color experience disproportionate exposure to environmental contaminants that produce negative health outcomes and many interrelated environmental justice challenges. Many of the exposures and infrastructure inequalities experienced by these communities are legacies of residential racial segregation, such as redlining and underbounding. While the environmental justice movement has made great strides in incorporating public health research into these issues, there has been less effort focused on integrating environmental engineering, infrastructure design, and student training into the movement. This presentation will provide an overview of our research, which integrates environmental engineering, applied anthropology, and STEM education to redesign existing civil and environmental engineering courses to center environmental justice and equitable development. The redesigned curriculum provides broader educational training to address environmental engineering challenges, meets community identified needs, and responds to the impacts of structural racism. The project is also studying the effects of the new curriculum on student perceptions of racism and justice and on faculty interest and capacity for catalyzing additional curricular and co-curricular change. Initial collaborations from the community-based research featuring oral history and other social science methods have resulted in diverse communications tools.
