DEI Coordinator
Meet the DEI Coordinator for the Department of Sociology
Professor Jennifer Carrera is DEI Coordinator and Associate Professor for the Department of Sociology. She has a joint appointment between the Department of Sociology and the Environmental Science and Policy Program.
Dr. Carrera’s research uses an environmental justice perspective, grounded in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) methods, to examine the differential impacts of access to environmental resources on distributions of power in marginalized communities. Her area of research focuses on environmental justice issues of access to clean water and sanitation in low-income communities.
As part of MSU’s Global Water Initiative, Dr. Carrera was lead PI for a WaterCube research team which conducted a CBPR citizen science study investigating water quality associated with water shutoffs in Detroit. This work was featured in MSU’s The Engaged Scholar Magazine.
In 2018 Dr. Carrera was awarded a Transition to Independent Environmental Health Research Career Award (K01) from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), to work with community partners in Flint, Michigan to develop low-cost technologies for understanding environmental risks and protecting public health. She aims to establish evidence-based pathways for engaging with communities to enhance public health through the co-development of low-cost technologies to address unmet community scientific needs.
Current research
Often little consideration is given to how communities produce their own information about proper ways of managing risks and opportunities. Through working with communities to develop their own research questions, collect, analyze, and interpret data community members may gain environmental health literacy as well as an interest in the governance of their resources. As the Flint Water Crisis demonstrates, knowledge about water quality is deeply tied to questions of environmental justice. Dr. Carrera uses citizen science methods along with co-development of innovative, low-cost technologies for environmental monitoring to address issues of undone science in the context of environmentally vulnerable communities.