The Publications

“Community Concerns Around the Radford Army Ammunition Plant” (March 2019) by Shannon Bell, Olivia D’Amato, Allyson Dixon, Julia Gohlke, Tyneshia Griffin, Meghan Johnson, Sean Kim, Nicholas Mahler, Justin Martin, Quynh Nguyen, John Odorski, Emma Ruby, and Emily Satterwhite.

The Virginia Mercury published our presentation slides online as part of its coverage of the March 2019 RAAP community meeting. (Mason Adams, “Softer Tone Emerges in Meetings between Community, Military Over Munitions Plant Pollution,” Virginia Mercury, March 28, 2019.)

“Building Interdisciplinary Partnerships for Community-Engaged Environmental Health Research in Appalachian Virginia” (March 2020) by Emily Satterwhite, Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Linsey C. Marr, Christopher K. Thompson, Aaron J. Prussin II, Lauren Buttling, Jin Pan, and Julia M. Gohlke, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17:5.

Virginia Tech researchers published an article about the experience of teaching this course.

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”.