Course Syllabi

• Research Ethics in Environmental Research, by Dianne Quigley and David Sonnenfield, Winter/Spring 2011. Training on research ethics combined with cultural diversity will prepare students with new research approaches/methods that are appropriate to field studies, community-based partnerships and research with cultural groups. Students will learn about required human subjects protections, ethical theories, cultural competence theory, and review environmental case studies for community-based, culturally-appropriate approaches. 
   
• Summer Graduate Workshop on Research Ethics and Cultural Competence in Environmental Science, Engineering, and Related Fields, by Dianne Quigley, Summer 2011. A three day-long summer workshop at SUNY Syracuse's College of Environmental Science and Forestry where students will review human subject protections, IRB requirements, informed consent, community-based participatory research, and other critical components of research ethics.
   
• Environmental Justice: The Science and Political Economy of Environmental Health and Justice, by Dianne Quigley, Spring 2011. In this course, students will learn about the disproportionate burdens of environmental contamination and about the health disparities affecting communities of color across the US and internationally. Since the early 1990's, an environmental justice movement in the US, led by many racially-diverse leaders, has achieved much progress in advocating for just forms of health research, improved environmental/health policies, and worker protections to remedy these harms of racial/cultural injustice. In this course, we will review environmental health/justice theories and perspectives as they bear on case studies of Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Latin American indigenous groups and Asian-Americans and how they have organized to improve health and justice in their rural/urban neighborhoods, reservations and cities. We will review programs that have been organized to address childhood asthma reduction, lead poisoning prevention, waste recycling, clean-up and restoration of contaminated sites, sustainable/organic agriculture, clean energy programs and cancer and health disparities research. Students will be asked to critically examine these efforts and also explore unresolved, chronic problems with environmental injustices and health impacts. 
   
•  Working with Communities: Cultural Competence and Ethics, by Dianne Quigley, Fall 2010. New ethical research practices with community populations stress partnership and participatory models with community members. Working in partnership and sharing control over the research process can lead to significant new challenges in the scientific practice of community/environmental health interventions and environmental research. This course will explore how bio-medical research protections for individuals can be extended to groups and communities by reviewing case studies in community-based, participatory research and ethical theories of principle ethics, virtue ethics, communitarian, deontology, ethics of care and post-modern ethics. A review of informed consent theory and international case studies on informed consent with communities will provide training to students on how these research ethics challenges are being addressed. We will review public health, environmental studies research approaches/designs that can engage culturally-diverse communities with culturally-appropriate methods.