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These last two points have been particularly salient as early-career researchers. Success as a researcher can be elusive — and job security is not a guarantee. We have seen faculty and students leave or be pushed out. We are speculating about the reasons for these departures, but we believe that some may be due to inadequate financial, social, and emotional support by institutions and individuals. Most of these individuals were people of color or from other systematically marginalized groups.
And many don’t even get a chance. Marginalized racial and ethnic groups are underrepresented in academia. While Black and Latino people represent 13% and 18% of the U.S. population, respectively, only 6% of professors in the U.S. are from these groups.
Research also shows biases in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the main federal funding agency for academic health researchers — specifically for Black people. These differences are in part explained by the topic areas that researchers propose to study. Notably, Black researchers are more likely to propose studies that examine health disparities and studies that develop ways to prevent those disparities by collaborating with community groups, which in turn have historically received the least amount of funding.
Recently, there has been a groundswell of interest in addressing health disparities and working toward health equity, including in environmental health sciences. We hope it translates into improved health for marginalized groups and leads to more faculty representing those groups succeeding as researchers. We wanted to learn from Black and Latina researchers who are part of this positive trend and have achieved national stature for their work in environmental health disparities as well as developing interventions toward health equity.
We posed four questions to Dr. Paloma Beamer (Professor at the University of Arizona), Dr. Christina H. Fuller (Associate Professor at Georgia State University), and Dr. Chandra Jackson (Earl Stadtman Investigator in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences).
We hope you will learn as much from them as we did. Responses are lightly edited for brevity.
The funding environment is improving for research addressing environmental disparities and environmental justice, but that has not always been the case. Can you tell us how you have dealt with difficult grant environments? How did you persist through times when you had limited or no success in getting your research agenda funded?
Dr. Paloma Beamer
There was a time in my career that I started to believe it was impossible to get grants funded. I remember a colleague telling me that I should consider changing my focus area so that I could get more funding, especially from industry, like him. I ended up developing a line of research looking at the intersection of environmental and social determinants of health in development of asthma in a 40-year-old birth cohort. I was able to develop a team of mentors that really taught me how to write grants, conduct epidemiological analyses, and critically think in a whole new way. This cross-training is what allowed me to be more successful in writing NIH grants.
Dr. Christina H. Fuller
When funding is slim or none, I’ve forged ahead and done research without it. Even with funding, there is a significant amount of relationship building and investment in community dialogue that must be established beforehand. This work is almost never funded but is integral to ensuring benefit for the communities involved. Then I have been able to leverage these relationships for future proposals.
Dr. Chandra Jackson
I am an investigator within the intramural program at National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and consequently do not need to apply for grants to support my salary and research program. I, however, would seek to add value to and collaborate with more senior, well-funded investigators who conduct research of interest to me. This also presents an opportunity to sharpen grant-writing skills while the structural barriers to accessing funding are being addressed.
In recent years, there have been discussions of a shift from a large focus on discovery and knowledge generation to being more inclusive of service and political and community engagement. Do you support this transition? If not, why? If so, are you able to push forward this agenda in your work?
Dr. Paloma Beamer
I believe wholeheartedly that this is a necessary step toward achieving environmental justice and health equity. How many more mice need to die before we know that arsenic is bad for you? We need more funding for solutions that address the root cause of the health effects of arsenic. I would like to see more opportunities for community engagement to design interventions to address environmental exposures without having to extend the research to health outcomes, especially for contaminants whose toxicity is well characterized.
Dr. Christina H. Fuller
I definitely agree and advocate for this shift. Research in this arena must be grounded in and with people. A great deal of knowledge is already held by those in the community. The researchers do not necessarily discover new information, but instead can reveal and clarify data and associations for a new audience and with a defined purpose.
Dr. Chandra Jackson
I certainly support this shift because new knowledge can be generated in a variety of traditional and non-traditional ways. We need research that can be integrated along the entire translational spectrum — from basic science to global population health. So, everyone has a role, and technological advancements have made the integration of various scientific disciplines possible. Community engagement through citizen science approaches, for instance, are essential.
We get a lot of advice and imagine you do, too. What is the worst piece of professional advice you have ever received?
Dr. Paloma Beamer
I did have one person tell me I should work on my accent. |
Dr. Christina H. Fuller
I was once told that I should not pursue community-engagement in my work, because it would cause my research to be biased. This assumes that other frameworks for research are completely unbiased, which is not necessarily true.
Dr. Chandra Jackson
I was advised to not interview for a particular position since I had already received an offer from what was perceived as a more prestigious institution. Prestige, however, does not automatically equate to tangible benefits, and I think a person should select an institution that can provide the most material and social support to meet the person’s needs or goals.
What is the best piece of advice you received over the years? Or, do you have any advice you would like to share with early career researchers?
Dr. Paloma Beamer
One of the best pieces of advice from one of my first mentors as an assistant professor was to never to agree to anything without saying, “Let me check with my mentor.” While, as I got more experienced, I didn’t always check with my mentor, I learned that it gave me some time to think about the request and if it would benefit my career or the work I’m passionate about. I would tell early career researchers to get a mentor (or a few of them), to focus your time on things that advance your career and the communities you care about.
Dr. Christina H. Fuller
My advice is to not be deterred by nay-sayers or attacks on the validity of your research simply due to its topic or inclusiveness. Focus on elevating research around your interests by utilizing the scientific and lay tools that you have learned as a researcher and a human being.
Dr. Chandra Jackson
I would like to share the following advice: (1) Remain authentic. (2) Define professional and personal success for yourself, and do not rely on society’s definition. (3) Establish a team of mentors who are succeeding in a manner that aligns with your own definition of success along with values. (4) Establish healthy boundaries early and take care of yourself since you cannot “pour from an empty cup.” (5) Be prepared to and get comfortable with speaking up. Marginalized individuals and groups tend to “shrink” or assume their contributions are less significant, but unique backgrounds and experiences fuel innovation and are inherently, as well as demonstrably, valuable.
We feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from these three leaders.
We leave you with three of our takeaways.
Define success for yourself
Our experiences, and those of many others, in academia have been full of scrutiny and failure. Standards for success are high—getting promoted or tenure requires being the absolute best in your field. It’s no wonder that many junior researchers are plagued by imposter syndrome.
Dr. Jackson tells us to ignore what those around us define as success and think about what it means to be successful for ourselves, advice that can be instrumental in finding happiness and fulfillment for those constantly thinking about how to achieve the next research goal, be it your first publication, a grant, or a job.
As one might expect, the quest to be ‘successful’ in research leads to high rates of burnout. Only take on tasks that serve your best interests and do not come at the expense of personal happiness and well-being.Be creative
Just as we should define success for ourselves, we should define our own trajectories. The super stars whose work you admire came up in a different era, with different questions, different funding environments, and different strategies. The paths to success today are inevitably going to look different.
To improve chances for success, we should aim to have a team of mentors, at different stages in their careers, each with complementary expertise whose explicit focus is to elevate us through tangible sponsorship, as researchers and individuals.
Drs. Beamer and Jackson also offer excellent advice to collaborate with those with histories of success. Still, Dr. Fuller notes that we can make incremental, but important, progress even when funding is absent, especially in our local communities.
Have a strong moral compass to persevere
When we talk about environmental justice, we use the word justice because it is imbued with a notion of ethics and morality.
Hardships in research and academia are expected, but for those dedicated to advancing justice and equity, and especially those from historically marginalized groups, these struggles are even more common.
Our three respondents share vivid examples of overt and indirect threats to their research. Their persistence is noteworthy, but also necessary. Frequent rejection—papers that get rejected or are not cited despite rigor and relevance; grants that don’t get funded—is expected. And yet, each time hurts, and a strong moral compass will help us persevere.
Meaningful institutional and structural support would aid in our struggle for equity and justice.
Dr. Daniel Carrión is an Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Dr. Carlos Gould is a School of Earth Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. They are both senior fellows of the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice program.
This essay was produced through the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellowship. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.
Lewis presents 19th-century Senegal at a time of turmoil. She explores how French colonialism and demand for peanut oil in Europe created a peanut boom with lasting repercussions for Senegalese agriculture and reinforced a system of slavery that persisted long after France had banned it in territories it held.
EHN spoke with Lewis about her book and writing about agriculture and the environment in Senegal today.
How was the peanut traditionally cultivated in West Africa, and how did it become a major export crop to Europe?
The peanut comes originally from South America, where it evolved and spread throughout the continent. It was probably taken quite early by Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors back to Europe, and from Europe to Africa. Peanuts were grown on a small scale and in kitchen gardens along with other complements to a diet … so, not at the same scale as cereals like millet or folio in Senegal, but grown probably like okra or cowpeas.
It expanded once there was a demand for peanut oil in Europe during the Industrial Revolution. They needed oil for maintaining their machines and steam engines. Before petroleum, they also needed oil for lighting. And, of course, they were killing whales for oil. A society that’s killing large sea mammals for oil obviously needs a lot of oil. But then, the main driver became the soap industry. Peanut oil has very similar chemical properties as olive oil and could be substituted up to a percentage in the Savon de Marseille.
In the 19th century, the Wolof kingdom of Kajoor, between Dakar and the French-held coastal archipelago of Saint Louis, became the center of the peanut boom and needed more and more people to work the land as demand increased. Explain the connection between the peanut boom and slavery.
Kajoor’s sandy soil environment was perfect for the peanut. I knew that a long time ago there had been a more robust peanut economy there; peanuts from Kajoor were so well-prized in Europe. Was it the peanut that created the expansion of slavery? In West Africa, there were people who were born enslaved. But there came to be a demand for labor in Kajoor, and that brought people enslaved through war. Why was there war? In part, because of economic developments related to European presence and capitalism.
The person who becomes an important vehicle for telling this larger story is Walter Taylor, a missionary in Saint Louis who founded a refuge for enslaved people and had to contend with colonial authorities turning a blind eye to slavery to protect economic interests, even though France abolished slavery in 1848. How did you come to realize that Taylor had the potential to carry a lot of the story?
I’d been reading a book about slavery in the 19th century, and there was a brief reference to a Sierra Leonean Protestant missionary named Walter Taylor, who established a shelter for runaway slaves in Saint Louis. I found that this Black missionary from a British-held territory had 20 years of letters with the mission directorate in Paris.
Even though Taylor was working, in a way, for the colonial enterprise, he had such an interesting backstory as a Black man in a white-dominated colonial system, as an Anglophone in the Francophone world, and as the son of liberated slaves who'd grown up in a community of people who had been liberated. I became a little obsessed with his story.
There was a movement of enslaved people from the interior trying to get to Saint Louis as a kind of promised land. But the process of claiming freedom was administratively difficult. Arriving runaway slaves would have to register with the city and say, “I declare I have a right to my freedom.” But then they had to wait three months. And within those three months, a slave owner could come and reclaim that person.
The court preferred people not bring these matters before the court, so a slave master might find the person and say, “I can leave you alone if you pay for your freedom.” But who has that much money? So Walter Taylor had the idea to take up a collection in the church. He realized there was an opportunity to evangelize among this group, who were open to the mission because it had helped them.
Taylor was trying to build a career for himself in the mission. He needed converts. But as a person who'd grown up in a community of liberated people, I think he really did care for them, and their stories resonated with his own on some deeper level.
Another strong yet contrasting character to Taylor is Lat Joor, the damel, or king, of Kajoor. What was his story?
Lat Joor became damel, was forced out by the French, and then came back through dubious methods and betrayals. He was jockeying for influence to keep his throne. He thought for a while that the French could be a tool to help him do that — before he started to understand, as maybe all colonized people eventually understand, these people are not here to help you, they are here to take your land.
Lat Joor had a lot of enslaved people. I found letter after letter in which he wrote to the [colonial] governor or commandant to say, “Please return to me my slave.” But Lat Joor is an epic, heroic figure in Senegalese history because of his resistance to colonization. I think my book shows that that resistance was not always straight. There was some collaboration before there was resistance.
You write about wanting to ensure the voices of the enslaved and others not well represented in the historical record were part of this book — a challenging task. How did you find their stories?
I wanted to include women’s voices and others who weren’t part of the elite. I also wanted to include the voices of the enslaved. I found some stories in the mission’s archives and court records, narratives of how they came to be enslaved and how they came to be free. Trying to tell this story from that perspective was really important to me, especially because sometimes an approach to popular African history tends to create hero narratives as a corrective — a very sensible corrective — to hundreds of years of denigration of African culture and history. But I also wanted to show the whole history, to say we have complicated stories about people who are not just good or bad, because we're all complex characters with different motives, who at different points in time err on the side of goodness or evil.
What is the conversation in Senegal today about sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty?
I see Senegalese agriculture scaling up, trying to be like American or European agriculture. The same ideas of industrialized agriculture predominate. There are some small movements here, but what Senegal probably needs is extreme regenerative agriculture, and I don't particularly see that happening. I see the agriculture industry is largely business as usual — fertilizers, pesticides. Let's modernize. That's something you hear a lot, which means becoming like the industrialized agriculture of America,Europe, China, or even India. All of them have their imprimatur on the way Senegal sees its agricultural system.
The baobab tree makes numerous appearances in your book. You also wrote a beautiful essay about the baobab recently for Emergence Magazine. What does it mean to you?
The baobab tree is so omnipresent in Senegal’s history and understanding of itself. But at the same time, it's so endangered. When I travel in Senegal, I think about all those lost trees, and the amount of history they represent, because baobabs are so long-lived, almost like redwoods. It’s hard even to fix our imagination on what it means to be in the presence of a thousand or two-thousand-year-old tree, right?
Our human living memory is only like 110 years old. But the baobab tree — how long is the living memory of that tree? It's incredible to imagine how many shifts humanity has been through in those 2,000 years.
Thinking about that long view of history brings up the role of climate, which also lurks in the background of your book and invites us to reflect on our current condition.
In a couple of chapters, I mention a period called the “hunger years,” brought on by cyclical drought. People were at the whims of the natural environment that pushed them to make political or economic decisions. You’d see more conflict sometimes, people migrating to the city. It’s really interesting to get the broad sweep of history and see how climate is its own character in the book.
Today we’re so insulated, especially in America. But even in Senegal, a certain class of people is really insulated from the reality of the climate. What’s the impact of that over the long term? We just keep cutting things down, not paying attention to what the signals are telling us.
The climate’s part of it, but our political decisions are more often than not what determines access to food, safety, water, all of it, which brings us back to Slaves for Peanuts. Unwittingly, the consumer of French soap was driving continued enslavement in Africa. It’s important to understand how our choices impact the larger system, the larger world.
Lewis’ book is published by The New Press and available from independent booksellers and online vendors large and small.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
