Research

We can throw up our hands at the magnitude of the task of negotiating the complexities of our individual situated standpoints, or we can embrace a form of engaged scholarship that is grounded in a commitment to dialogical knowledge production. C. Wright Mills’s rich concept of the sociological imagination that places individual biography, history, and society in dialogue becomes useful to ground dialogical knowledge production.”

Patricia Hill Collins (2012:15), in “Looking Back, Moving Ahead: Scholarship in Service to Social Justice” Gender and Society 26(1):14-22

Water protectors at the Des Moines River in Boone County, Iowa (September 2016) where Dakota Access was boring beneath the river to install the Dakota Access pipeline

My research studies environmental social problems related to extractivism—be it water, energy, or agriculture—and the centering of justice both within my research questions and my own research process.

I have studied the politicization of water quality in Iowa, environmental racism related to lead poisoning in children in Davenport, Iowa, as well as the importance of community in addressing cultural shifts in institutional approaches, policy, and needed improvements in practices on the ground. I regularly partner with biological scientists, community organizations, extension agents, government officials, and local leaders to address natural resource challenges.

While primarily qualitative, consisting of content analysis, ethnography, interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, my research has also employed mixed methods, such as surveys and concept mapping. In addition to scholarship, I have combined my research with applied learning opportunities in the classroom and have produced tools and curricula for local partners to use in creating change in their communities.

Patti Edwardson Naylor shares her experiences with cover crops at a 2015 learning circle with women farmland owners at Whiterock Conservancy in Coon Rapids, IA.

Research Interests

• Community-based and alternative agrifood-energy systems
• Grassroots movements to protect the commons
• Environmental challenges and conflicts related to food and water access, pollution, and scarcity
• Land tenure and power
• Corporate influence and the public interest in the production of science

Current Research

• Community-based food systems and food justice in the Upper Peninsula in collaboration with the Western UP Food Systems Council
  
• Agroecology and community development
• Gender and agriculture

Past Research

• Reframing of agricultural water conflicts in the Iowa-based resistance to Dakota Access’ pipeline
• Policy and grassroots’ advocacy in the case of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
• Community-based approaches to mitigating lead-paint poisoning in Davenport, Iowa (in partnership with Environmental Sociology course taught at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL)
• River Stories: photovoice project led by women farmland owners in Iowa’s Raccoon and Des Moines River watersheds
• Occupy movement and defending public science at the land grant university: the case of the AgriSol Energy project
• Institutional challenges to integrating social justice within sustainable agriculture graduate curriculum
• Strategizing agency and community partnerships: a case study of an urban fishing program in Des Moines, Iowa

Women farmland owners participating in soil health and conservation field day in Iowa in the fall of 2015.

Women farmland owners, county conservation staff, and state department of natural resources staff in Iowa test and discuss water quality at a wetland field day in summer of 2014.