Andréanne Breton-Carbonneau is a doctoral researcher with BCNUEJ at ICTA-UAB, where she explores the health equity impacts of planning and implementing green resilient infrastructure. We caught up with her to learn more about how she got here and where she wants to go.
Andreanne (right) with BCNUEJ team members.
You started out as a biomedical engineer. How did you end up working in environmental justice?
I’ve always been interested in health issues. I’ve wanted to be medical doctor, a veterinarian, and a biomedical researcher (like my mom). During my undergrad, I realized that I liked asking questions and trying to answer them and also that I wanted to have a more direct, positive impact on people’s lives. While doing my Masters in biomedical engineering, I became aware of the challenges many foreign graduate students and their families were having in relation to immigration and access to healthcare. This is when I started hearing of what people were calling public health and very quickly switched over!
In my Masters in public health I learned how interrelated public health is with social justice and climate change. Subsequently, environmental justice became a framework that I gravitated to as it touches many justice issues that are important to me: issues of race, class, and gender, and how these relate to the unjust and harmful human health outcomes occurring from toxic environments, implicating other health issues like animal and planetary health.
What is your current research with BCNUEJ at ICTA-UAB focused on?
My thesis is looking at the extent to which urban governance and green initiatives either weaken or contribute to health justice. In the fall of 2021, I applied for the Healthy Neighborhoods Study Emerging Scholars fellowship. I didn’t get it, but the review board put me in contact with Everett Community Growers (ECG), a community-based food justice organization in Massachusetts that I had worked with in a past life before starting my PhD! I was of course thrilled to have the opportunity to work with this group again in a different role. ECG had designed a workshop series to look at the effects of heat, health, and housing on immigrant and lower-working class community members and what the community can do to address these impacts. With this project, I was then awarded the Healthy Neighborhoods Study Emerging Scholars fellowship in the fall of 2022.
Andreanne at the 2022 International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH) in Valencia, Spain.
Gentrification is such a buzz word we often overlook the real-life stories of those affected by it. What stories have you come across through your research?
The stories that struck me weren’t necessarily those of a specific person or a specific family, but about the interplay between dispossession of time from families and the tearing apart of a community. For example, there are many parents unable to afford the rising cost of living, so their teenagers work after school and on the weekends to support their parents. Not only are parents overwhelmed, often working multiple jobs, but their children are as well, as they too try to balance school performance with making ends meet.
In one of the workshops, one parent asked: “How can you build a community if you don’t have time to create a household?” As more people are priced out of the city, family and close friends who share support, love, and care are becoming “misplaced.” This was a term that one of the workshop participants used and it was an incredibly poignant sentiment for me.
Andreanne facilitating a workshop with the Everett community.
What have you learned as a researcher and on a personal level from interaction with these residents?
This project was a participatory action research (PAR) project, and it drastically shifted how I approached my research questions and challenged my assumptions in ways I was not expecting. I used to try to steer discussions to answer my questions “directly.” For this project, my researcher brain was thinking “the discussion is supposed to be about adaptation measures for climate resilience,” but no one is talking about impervious surfaces, rain capture, parks and tree cover, or even community land trusts.
Instead, the conversations focused on gentrification, displacement, disempowerment, and exclusion. I learned that just because communities answer our research questions in unexpected ways, it does not mean that their responses are irrelevant. PAR shifted the emphasis from what changes in a neighborhood matter for climate resilience and health to how these changes should occur and who should have agency over them to develop true climate resilience and health. The what ultimately doesn’t matter for folks if they’re not being involved to create it or aren’t going to be around to benefit from it.
Andreanne with Everett Community Growers staff at an event hosted by the Healthy Neighborhoods Study at the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston, MA.
How is the climate crisis interacting with gentrification’s impacts on health?
I see the climate crisis as an amplifier of our society’s dysfunctions. With climate change comes urban green grabbing, green gentrification, and climate gentrification. With these hyper-capitalist modes of climate protection or climate resilience, we will continue to observe unbalanced and ultimately unjust health outcomes in who suffers most from heat/cold-related illnesses or who is most exposed to storms and floods and subsequent infections. Not to mention the added mental health burden placed upon historically marginalized groups from pre-existing trauma of surviving ongoing stressors and the anticipation of further deprivation from post-climate impacts.
There are some cities that have centered justice and equity in their planning documents and there are some cities that I believe are genuine in their attempts to right the wrongs of these historical legacies. That said, if my project in Everett taught me anything it’s not the what but the how that matters. It’s not about what justice terms are used or even what intentions a city holds, but how the justice terms and intent are put into practice. How are cities shifting power and ownership of these resilience and health projects to actually protect or improve the health and well-being of the communities they purport to?
What do you love and hate the most about your job?
I love that I can use my acquired knowledge, skills, and resources to highlight the ways historically marginalized groups navigate, contest and reimagine the world for greater climate resilience and health. These stories are often ignored or discarded, but I believe they’re a critical piece to the puzzle for climate resilience in our world’s cities.
I hate writing academic papers (hopefully this doesn’t get me in trouble with any journals!). I want my “knowledge production” to be actionable for the advancement of justice by community members, advocacy groups, mission-driven organizations, and policymakers. I’m not sure that the traditional format or dissemination of the academic paper is the most effective for doing that.
Where do you want to go with your research in the future?
Ah, the dreaded question for any student! To be honest I’m not sure where I want to go, but I know that I don’t want to continue in academia. The hustle of “publish or perish” really is not for me (especially since writing academic papers is my least favorite part of this work). I’ve thought about being involved in private planning firms that focus on healthy cities or growing my own consulting company. I’ve even thought about switching focus entirely and carrying my research skills to user experience research to design more accessible and supportive technologies or social services. At this point I’m trying to keep an open mind and see what opportunities arise from this immense privilege of being a doctoral researcher.
Shameless plug: I’ll be on the job market in the fall of 2024, so if anyone is seeing this and wants to talk about future work opportunities, hit me up!
