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������Dennis Doyle,��MFA student in Art Practices and Sculpture and Post Studio Practice,��

Nicholas Shapiro��is an Assistant Professor in the Society and Genetics Department at the University of California at Los Angeles. Shapiro is a multidisciplinary researcher who analyzes and designs interventions into chemical pollution and climate change. At UCLA, Shapiro heads the��, a multidisciplinary environmental research lab that studies toxic living conditions, and the complicated role that science plays in accountability processes within carceral institutions.

In the following interview, Shapiro talks about the values of the Carceral Ecologies Lab, how he develops relationships with community members, and building communities of care and accountability.��

“...I think we can use abolitionists’ insights and values to get beyond that, that feeling that these environmental evils are necessary.”

In the opening section, we discuss the abolitionist and community centered values that underpin Shapiro’s work and that of the Carceral Ecologies Lab.

D: How have your background, identities, and experiences informed your research in community engaged work?

N: I think my family has been a really big influence on the kind of work that I do.

Particularly, I would say, my mom and my sister. I guess professionally my mom’s an American history middle school teacher who doesn't actually teach ethics, but she says that she's an American history and ethics teacher. So weaving ethics into looking back at the history of the United States. And then my sister is a community organizer back in Atlanta where I grew up. She has the “community partner” perspective. She's also very tired of a lot of traditional academic approaches to community engagement.

I think both of those perspectives together influence the kind of consideration that I give to my work with community. The way that I attempt to listen. Also specifically to some of the topics. My sister was doing abolitionist work for a long time and basically organized me into coming back to studying carceral facilities, after having done some of that in my undergrad.

So yeah, openness to being organized by your family members was definitely part of my specific approach.

D: That's�� a really awesome connection. Family members definitely have a specific relationship in which there's a sense of admiration and connection and then also are people who feel comfortable applying pressure to really challenge you and push you in certain ways.

N: Yeah, that was something that I was talking with one of my students yesterday about. She’s just graduated so she’s trying to figure out at what point she feels comfortable enough organizing her more than nuclear family. Is this the long game? Is it a 10 year game? When can I agitate and do I do it at my graduation party? Is that appropriate? These are definitely some of the questions that a lot of us in the lab are asking ourselves.

D: So, what are your values, theories, or worldviews and how do you put those elements into practice in your work with communities?

N: I think that abolition is key. I’m not sure if it's a value. It's a key pragmatic approach to systemic change that I learn from listening to my community partners that are dealing with prison industrial complex abolition. I'm trying to bring that same largely black-lead, critical thought to environmentalism.

I think environmentalism is so adamantly invested in reformism that any kind of environmental critique is just so readily co-opted and ends up optimizing harm rather than preempting it.�� And so that to me is part of the struggle of the lab. It is to get beyond what Eyal Wiezman calls����. It’s the forever hovering at an arbitrary quantification of harm right under the number of the beast: 666. I think that's sort of where modernity lies: just under some arbitrary threshold of the unbearable. Whereas I think we can use abolitionists’ insights and values to get beyond that, that feeling that these environmental evils are necessary. So how do we make them unnecessary becomes the question.

My lab has other values. Critical environmental justice, which is a term that David Pellow articulated, is helping dial in the specificity of the kind of environmental justice that we advocate for.

Accountability is key. Accountability is another value. I think across my work on environmental injustice and criminal punishment system injustice, accountability is a common problem. On one end of the spectrum you've got the under-inspection and enforcement of the state and corporate polluters and on the other end we've got this hyper-policing and incarceration of communities of color. These are the ends of the spectrum of accountability failures in the US. And so I think there's shared lessons across both of those. I think we're struggling with issues of safety across both. What does safety look like? How do we achieve safety? Those are part of the key failings of both ends of these accountability systems in the US.

And then humility. Humility and solidarity are also our values. So sometimes, you need to put a social media campaign together to hype someone's GoFundMe and that's what the work looks like as opposed to just crunching the numbers or doing the interviews or whatever your research is looking like. That's what we did for one of the community members who lost her child's father in jail a few years ago. Running a GoFundMe to do legal support was what was necessary in order to do that research as well. How do you stabilize the community members so that they can engage in this next level of struggle which is research?

D: A follow up question to that: Thinking about ideas like 665, what are your values when you think of future and futurity? In a world that has fixed ecological damage or with systems that are extremely oppressive and heavy, how do you think about protecting values into the future?

This is sort of paraphrasing something that����said at the end of 2016 when we were on the verge of the Trump administration dismantling our environmental protection apparatus. But even at that point, the end of the Obama EPA was funded at 1980s levels so it wasn't actually as good as one might think. But I think it's in moments of acute crisis that we need to not triage out radical change.��

I think there are some ways that these prevailing reformist logics triumph in these spaces. But we know that reformism is escapism. And in many instances–I’m not saying always, but often in criminal injustice reforms and often in environmental reforms–we are so focused on reformism to the extent that we can't understand it empirically. And we see that these interventions and large scale changes that are deemed non-practical, but they are actually practical, just the conventional definition of practical is overly constricted.

And so it's really an investment in a specific imaginary of what is feasible and practical and I think art has a really big place in potentially dislodging this stubborn conceptual limitation and helping us experiment and create alternative imaginaries that really end up being potentially more impactful than the instrumental reformist interventions that really define the problem incorrectly.

“...to think more deeply, to research more broadly on better protocols for aligning these different values of academic production and community knowledge production.”

We moved the conversation next to focus on how Shapiro’s work with community partners. We discussed ways to break down the boundaries around academia and critically defining what success means in community engaged research.

D: To the next question, how do you build relationships with your community partners and how do you maintain these relationships beyond and after your collaborations.

N: I think the key is knowing that there is no model, at least for me. That there are different ways that communities can be involved in research.

For example, one project that we're doing involves looking at how the medical examiner coroner system in Los Angeles County is leveraging biomedicine as alibis for an unaccountable sheriff�� violence. So we are looking at how black deaths are being naturalized by medical examiners. And that's a research project that the community came up with. They came up with the idea, they got the data, and they were like, “Do it.” So that's one version. Another version is coming up with some basic ideas and then finding the right community partner to advance it and make sure that they're helping to set the agenda from early on, even if it's not from the very beginning. Sometimes you can involve the community in an advisory role, where you're paying them for their time just as an advisor and then, once you get a bigger grant, you can pull them in and be co-PI’s along with you.

And then I think, crucially, it's breaking down the division between the community and the lab and actively recruiting students from the communities that are being studied. My lab is largely women of color. We also actively recruit from something called the Underground Scholars Initiative, which is the system impacted and formerly incarcerated student organization. So I think when there's not a clear divide between the lab and the community, then that's where the work starts in terms of community engagement. Dissolving that divide allows for relationships to be built in different ways. For example, one of my students ended up becoming true friends with one of our community partners, because they both frequent a place that is a few blocks away from each other. LA is a big place so having people that are just a couple blocks away from each other is extraordinarily rare.

That's sort of an overview, but I think what is most important for me in the development of my abilities to engage the community is to actively work on my ability to listen and to create the right venues for listening. So I love the activist approach or the organizing approach of listening tours and listening sessions and having the desires of the community be able to be articulated even prior to some instrumental grant application or technology development.

I think staying open to constantly refining this process: it's exhausting absolutely exhausting. That last question is a good one, I don't have a good answer to it. But I think we're at a really exciting moment where we are getting beyond hyper-rigid, checkbox-style collaboration procedures to more dynamic protocols that are more directly generated by impacted communities. So I think it's a very exciting moment to be doing this kind of work.

D: I’m thinking about that boundary of the lab and breaking that down. In academia, that boundary is often a wall that's put up. Do you ever find resistance from the institution of academia, or that the community's relationship with academia is sort of a mistrust of that boundary? Do you find resistance to breaking that down?

N: Sometimes. There's a bunch of stories that come to mind. I think that there are all kinds of small bureaucratic ways that the university makes it impossible to do good community engagement. Once, I wanted to have a community advisor that was just going to come and talk for two hours and I’d pay them $250 an hour for each of the two sessions. The university wanted eight forms filled out and I didn't have the time to do it for them. It just was so disrespectful for them to have to spend at least as much time filling out forms and creating scopes of work and everything then actually delivering their advice for two hours.

So there's like this absurdism, there's this surrealism of what the university expectations are that I encounter over and over again. Sometimes you know I'm working with extremely structurally marginalized students and there's a lot of obligations and care work that pulls them out of the lab. So sometimes it can be outwardly difficult to get the work done when people are just trying to survive and the research isn't the priority. So not being punitive about that, within the lab is really important. Having lots of second and third chances in the lab are really important and also articulating our abolitionist values.

Sometimes I get pulled into other people's fights. I am pulled in by community members to help understand the way that researchers are weaponizing