ABSTRACT
Ethnography (“ethno” = culture and “graphy” = writing) involves firsthand research to interpret practices within a particular context through qualitative methods, including but not limited to interviews and participant observation. As we will argue, ethnography has been vital to the development of environmental justice as a movement and as an academic research topic due, at least in part, to its ethical commitment to fostering dialogue between the researcher and the researched. Of note for environmental justice, critical ethnography is defined by Madison (2012: 5) as a practice that “begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain.” Rather than romanticizing “critical distance” as a criterion of academic research, Conquergood (1982: 5, 9–11) invites critical ethnographic scholars to engage in “genuine conversation” through a “dialogical performance.”
