Environmental Justice Research Repository
This digital collection serves as a repository of research materials related to the history of environmental racism in the Eugene-Springfield community.
What is the purpose of this digital collection?
In consultation with the nonprofit organization Beyond Toxics, students and faculty at the University of Oregon are working to collect and catalog materials related to the formal and informal segregation of housing, education, and outdoor recreation opportunities in our city.
We aim to better understand the ways predominantly white institutions have systematically shifted environmental hazards onto communities of color and how these communities have organized and advocated around issues of environmental justice.
Explore the the Collection's Topics
Use this Digital Collection as Research Data
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Where did the primary sources come from?
The collection brings together reports, policy documents, maps, newspaper clippings, newsletters, museum exhibit catalogs, curricular materials, academic research, and demographic data that together shed light on our local history and its relationship to events and trends at the state, regional, and national level. These materials come from city, state, and federal government websites; UO Libraries digital collections; the Lane County History Museum Archives; and publicly available sources. They are gathered here for educational and not-for-profit research purposes in accordance with fair use doctrine. Materials were collected and selected by Lisa Arkin, Executive Director of the Beyond Toxics.
The materials in this collection are gathered here for educational and not-for-profit research purposes. The project team has either received explicit permission to include these materials in the collection or has completed a fair use evaluation for its use. The team has also made a good-faith effort to determine and record rights information about each primary source in the item-level metadata. Users who wish to reuse sources from this collection should verify independently the copyright status of each item and contact the rights holder directly for reuse permission.
Harmful Content Statement
This digital collection includes digitized archival materials that document traumatic histories and violent ideologies.
Some of these materials use offensive language, express biased or hateful views, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes, particularly with respect to race, color, national origin, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. In addition, some of the descriptive metadata used to catalog these materials is inherited from predominantly white institutions where communities of color have historically had less access and privilege, and therefore less control over their own representation.
The Eugene-Springfield community and the University of Oregon continue to reflect and to be structured by these histories, and our project team is not immune to bias or prejudice. We are actively working to remediate, re-process, and re-contextualize these objects as source material for anti-racist digital storytelling projects that might eventually play a small role in repairing some of these harms.