Knowledge and Valuation in Environmental Justice Struggles

The paper draws on the experience of adult education with community activists who are campaigning against environmental injustice. In common with environmental justice struggles throughout the world, all the communities experience negative economic externalities of capitalist development which is incommensurate with their own environmental valuation. The course uses methodologies derived from Paulo Freire and popular education to seek to maximise the relevance of the curriculum to the political struggles in which the communities are engaged. Such methodologies generate knowledge of environmental justice derived from dialogue between the experiences of communities of struggle, the strategic campaigning of an environmental organisation, and the traditions of academic rigour of a university. This produces a discourse which contrasts with the policy discourse based on positivist research. 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