Co-written by a pair of undergraduates and their faculty adviser, this essay shares our hands-on research experience uncovering, interpreting, and representing Hartford’s history through the lens of environmental justice in archives and public scholarship.

How do you study environmental justice using 19th-century documents—decades before the term even existed? That was the central question that kicked off our 2025 summer research with Trinity College’s Public Humanities Collaborative (PHC). This program brings together students, faculty, and local organizations to critically dig into humanities research and community-engaged practices—and make it public.

Working as a team of two student researchers (Celia and Gabriela), we spent our time with PHC navigating the archival collections at two local cultural institutions: the Stowe Center for Literary Activism and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. Our goal: locate, document, and interpret historical documents that shed light on Hartford residents’ definitions of and relationships with environmental justice.

Our summer research was part of the inaugural phases of the then-newly launched Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership. The Partnership is supported by a three-year Mellon Foundation Higher Education grant that explores how past land-use decisions have created health and environmental challenges for Hartford’s predominantly Latine and Black communities, and how understanding these histories can help guide regional solutions today.

From Classroom to Community

Before our research phase, the Partnership began in spring 2025 as part of a participatory action course on Environmental Justice Advocacy. Ten students from Trinity College and Connecticut State Community College piloted oral history interviews and PhotoVoice research with the community partner, the Center for Leadership and Justice. Together, the methods aimed to center the lived experiences of Greater Hartford residents (including the emotional impact of poor trash management) and amplify their voices during hearings on the city’s regional trash-burning incinerator (such as their views on the future of the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority, MIRA, trash plant site).

In their historical contextualization, Hartford was recognized as one of the nation’s poorest cities within an otherwise affluent metro area that has long faced environmental inequities. Since the 1980s, the MIRA trash-burning plant has served as a dumping ground for surrounding suburbs, contributing heavily to the city’s air and water pollution. Its closure in 2022 was a major victory—but it also highlighted the lasting impacts of historic land-use decisions.

Locating Environmental Justice Historically

Archival Research and Close Looking as Pedagogy (Amanda)

As a museum anthropologist, I often think about how historical materials shape our understanding of our collective pasts, presents, and futures. As a faculty co-PI and the project curator for the Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership, my main role is to gather, organize, and publicly present our project findings through exhibition contexts. During the first two years of the grant, I will work with my fall Anthropology of Museums class to curate a traveling pop-up exhibition for regional display, serving as a starting point for spring community dialogue sessions. In the third year, the project will culminate in a physical exhibition at the Stowe Center for Literary Activism, co-curated by summer researcher cohorts and students in my fall Ethnographic Methods & Writing course.

In our first summer of research, I advised anthropology majors Celia and Gabriela as they worked to historically frame the project’s existing assemblage of oral history and Photovoice accounts. Together, we asked: if the MIRA plant symbolizes urban planning and environmental injustice today, what historical precedents shaped these decisions?

Over the ten weeks of the Public Humanities Collaborative, I scaffolded methodological training to introduce students to archival analysis and institutional ethnography. For example, students reviewed readings from the Society of American Archivists which offers a public Zotero library of educational materials. These resources aimed to familiarize them with best practices for handling archival material and general disciplinary vocabulary. Celia and Gabriela also met with archival staff at local cultural institutions and examined museum websites to learn more about museum histories, helping to contextualize the spaces and documents that they would encounter.

To support their archival research visits and development of careful, close-looking skills or detailed visual observation that informs interpretation, I provided them with note-taking templates borrowing from art historical approaches. Celia and Gabriela were regularly prompted to analyze the documents that they located, both individually and within a broader historical context, especially when triangulating with other sources such as newspaper articles. As a curator, I view their notes and findings as contributing to a larger repository for the internal research team, which will inform future curatorial decisions. Students also critically evaluated their methods for ongoing use in the project in future research phases, and these personal analytical materials –alongside archival documents – may be incorporated into the project’s exhibition displays.

Developing a Methodological Process (Celia and Gabriela)

Environmental justice, a term coined in the 1980s, is defined by the American Public Health Association as the principle that all people and communities have the right to live and thrive in safe, healthy environments, with equal environmental protections and meaningful involvement in these efforts. We couldn’t search for this modern term in the archive’s card catalog. Our research process required methodological creativity.

Instead of focusing on contemporary key terms such as environmental justice, activism, or advocacy, we began researching and evaluating socially prominent individuals and organizations that publicly discussed and engaged with the environment through varied practices of care during this period. These practices, as we outline below, ranged from historical preservation to lobbying for urban planning policy. To trace these practices, we first needed to examine the broader institutional histories and the reasons that specific cultural institutions hold certain historical documents. For example, the archive at the Stowe Center—where we did most of our summer research—was assembled by advocate and artist Katharine Seymour Day who lived from 1870 to 1964, which is why the materials in this archive are primarily from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Stowe Center Archives, photograph by Celia Lanza.

As a starting point, we searched for historical examples of Hartford’s land use decisions and researched the associated individuals, organizations, and geographic locations. One term that yielded a wealth of information about historic land-use decisions in Hartford was our search for “Friends of Hartford,” a preservationist group responsible for purchasing and maintaining Hartford’s historic properties threatened with demolition and development, including the Stowe Center’s neighbor, the Mark Twain House. Katharine Seymour Day, the most prominent figure in the organization’s papers whose letters are significantly featured, was the organization’s president. Day was also the grandniece of anti-slavery novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and is remembered for a preservationist legacy that included creating and endowing the Stowe Center.

As we would learn over the course of our summer research, the Friends of Hartford organization aimed to promote the welfare of the city of Hartford and to make it an ideal place to live. In our close-looking work, we observed them tackling historic land-use decisions, arguing for a more “beautiful” Hartford, and opposing land-use decisions that commercialized Hartford by fragmenting neighborhoods with gas stations and other commercial development.

Letter from Katharine Seymour Day to Editor of the Hartford Courant, 1935, photograph by Celia Lanza.

The above letter from Katharine Seymour Day to the Editor of the Hartford Courant highlights one of the Hartford Environmental Research Partnership’s main contemporary research aims: regional consensus on issues of environmental racism. Day criticizes Hartford’s dumping system and urges residents to vote yes on Question 2, which would advance plans for a city incinerator. This document prompted us to investigate Hartford’s waste management history further, especially perspectives around city planning across socioeconomic demographics.

In the larger scope of our archival research about the history of early city planning decisions in the late 1800s and early 1900s, we began to appreciate how the locations of waste sites alongside factories, roads, and sewers established patterns of environmental hazards often being placed in neighborhoods of immigrants, working-class residents, and communities of color. Day’s letter paralleled other historical examples of suburbanite neighbors fighting to keep the threats of noise, pollution, and flooding at bay, reflecting broader patterns that environmental justice scholars identify as the unequal allocation of environmental benefits and burdens, with pollution and waste infrastructure more often directed toward marginalized urban communities. Day’s advocacy thus materialized a shared, enduring perception among affluent residents of ideal waste management practices and mirrored a logic later associated with “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) environmentalism: protecting one’s own community while shifting environmental risks onto others.

We concluded our archival research with the major takeaway that Greater Hartford’s environmental history is an aggregate of ongoing transformations of the landscape in the context of industrial development and community advocacy, including the complex, often imbalanced relationship between urban and suburban communities, articulated across class divisions. The consequences of these histories continue to materialize in the lived experiences of Connecticut residents. Today, for example, because of Hartford’s disproportionate share of air pollution compared to other cities of its size, its residents experience higher rates of respiratory diseases, such as asthma, due to these historic land-use decisions.

Materializing Environmental Justice

Curating Collaboration Practices and Environments of Care (Amanda)

One of the central decisions I made as a mentor during our summer research was to transition the students from producing a traditional archival finding aid toward creating what became known as an Urban Environmental Justice Zine. At first glance, this might seem like a small shift. Still, it reflected a deeper intention: I wanted to make our research process an accessible and reflective practice, grounded in how people relate to each other and to place. I was inspired by existing examples of environmentally focused zine products and professor-student collaborative writing about the zine-making process.

Working on a zine allowed us as a research group to approach the archival materials creatively, highlighting themes, stories, and connections that a conventional finding aid might flatten. It also offered us a space to foreground the students’ voices, their questions, and their “discoveries.” In this way, the zine became more than a research deliverable. Our collective process of brainstorming and editing became a space of care and ultimately, a product of a working dynamic in which historical curiosity and methodological frustration were encouraged equally alongside intellectual research rigor.

A major part of my goal here in shifting from our original plan was also to teach the curatorial process as inherently collaborative. Museums and archives are often imagined and experienced as top-down institutions, where a single curatorial authority decides what matters – or, who or what is valued and celebrated in public display and interpretation. I wanted Celia and Gabriela to experience curation differently: as a negotiation of standpoints, where multiple interpretations, backgrounds, and skill-sets might come together to produce something meaningful. In practice, this meant continually asking questions, reflecting on the relevance of materials, and experimenting with ways to make historical documents speak to contemporary environmental concerns.

Finally, I hoped that the students would leave with a critical understanding of the archive itself. Rather than neutral repositories of information, archives are culturally constructed spaces—shaped by who collected what, why, and under what assumptions and agendas. My hope for all undergraduates connected with this project, at any stage, past or present, is that they appreciate that archival materials are critical sites for understanding how people relate to their environment, how they care for it, and how that care has been unevenly distributed historically across different Greater Hartford communities and landscapes.

Communicating Research (Celia and Gabriela)

Archival research can feel daunting and overwhelming. This was both of our first experiences conducting long-term archival research. Finding a jumping-off point for archival research was difficult, especially when we couldn’t use 21st-century language to find relevant results. This is why we produced an Archival Research Guide and an Urban Environmental Justice Zine to help students conduct successful archival research generally or specifically on environmental justice. These project deliverables are filled with suggestions and resources we gathered from our firsthand experience conducting archival research.

In the Urban Environmental Justice Zine, we broke our findings into subsections of the major themes we found in the archives, much as a curator might approach exhibition design. These themes provide evidence that although we may not have been able to search for “environmental justice” directly, we found meaningful results by searching instead for urbanization, pollution, nature, religious symbolism, and spiritual stewardship. The purpose of the zine was to make archival analysis more accessible to our undergraduate peers and to demonstrate that, by developing archival fluency with cultural institutions around a particular topic and approaching documentary records creatively, beginner archival researchers can reinterpret historical records to engage their research questions.

Excerpts from the Urban Environmental Justice Zine, photographs by Celia Lanza.

Reflecting on our summer research experience, we’ve come to understand that collaboration wasn’t just helpful; it was essential to the research process. Creating the Urban Environmental Justice Zine was truly a team effort that brought together four student researchers with complementary roles. We concentrated mainly on archival research. Working alongside us were two other project student researchers, Kayla Houston and Sabin Limbu, who balanced their time between the archives and conducting oral history interviews with Hartford residents about their experiences with the MIRA trash plant and their understandings of environmental justice. This peer partnership, in which we all contributed to the investigation of historical materials, proved invaluable to creating a comprehensive, community-informed product.

We hope that our transparency about our research struggles and successes motivates future undergraduates to contribute to this grant project. We also aim to direct attention to one avenue for navigating the history of environmental justice by appreciating the intersection of the histories of Greater Hartford urban planning and institutional archival collection formation.

From an anthropological perspective, our research process mirrored how anthropologists examine complex social issues. The discipline teaches us to synthesize multiple sources of information to gain a deeper understanding of community lived experiences. Our findings uncovered historical patterns of decision-making across social positionality, and the oral history interviews our peers conducted simultaneously engaged these patterns with present realities.

Our peer collaboration grew through weekly meetings and group discussions. These conversations became the foundation of the zine. Instead of creating separate sections for “history” and “present day,” we combined our findings to illustrate shared themes over time. By placing archival documents alongside interview insights, we strove to demonstrate that understanding the past is crucial for addressing current environmental justice concerns.

This collaborative process deepened our understanding not only of the grant project itself but also of how museum curation and anthropological research function in practice.  As students, we engaged in this research and learning environment by sharing partial findings, regularly asking questions, and building understanding together through making. Environmental justice in Hartford involves histories of relationships among individuals, organizations, and landscapes, as well as current policy decisions and community experiences. In 19^th-century Hartford, what we might frame as environmental advocacy, for example, was often grounded in a faith-based vision of stewardship by ministers and theologians, as evidenced by the writing of Horace Bushnell (1802-1876), who asserted human agency beyond nature’s physical determinism in putting science in conversation with theology, and the archival correspondence of Charles Beecher (1815-1900), who envisioned sustainable designs for church architecture. From faculty to students to community partners, today we rely on archival records, Greater Hartford residents’ experiences, and each other’s research perspectives to see the full picture of environmental justice and to begin curating the story we will tell.

Author Bios

Celia Lanza is a Trinity College undergraduate (Class of 2026) majoring in history and anthropology. On campus, she works at the Watkinson Research Library, where she catalogs a collection of scrapbooks that explore the history of illustration. She has also served as Professor Guzmán’s teaching assistant for Decentering and Re-centering History: Anthropology of Museums in the fall semesters of 2023 and 2025. In summer 2025, Celia worked as a research assistant on Trinity College’s Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership. She conducted in-depth archival research at the Stowe Center for Literary Activism and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History to support the historical context for the upcoming 2027 exhibit. Alongside project research partners, she developed educational resources, including a How-To Archival Research worksheet and an Archival Subject Guide Zine. In the fall of 2025, as part of Professor Guzmán’s Ethnographic Methods and Writing class, she helped to develop a draft object list for the Partnership’s culminating exhibition at the Stowe Center for Literary Activism, including positioning the project’s research materials in conversation with existing institutional museum collections.

Gabriela Scavenius is a Trinity College undergraduate (Class of 2027), double-majoring in anthropology and computer science. Originally from Paraguay, she is particularly interested in medical anthropology. In summer 2025, Gabi worked as a research assistant on Trinity College’s Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership. She conducted in-depth archival research at the Stowe Center for Literary Activism and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History to support the historical context for the upcoming 2027 exhibit. Alongside project research partners, she developed educational resources, including a How-To Archival Research worksheet and an Archival Subject Guide Zine. In the fall of 2025, as part of Professor Guzmán’s Ethnographic Methods and Writing class, she helped develop the conceptual plan for the Partnership’s culminating exhibition, conducting further background research, including proposing exhibition themes and outlining their purpose and significance.

Amanda J. Guzmán is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the co-director of the Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. She serves as a faculty co-PI and the project curator for the Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership. Guzmán specializes in museum anthropology. She was a member of the 2024-2025 inaugural cohort of the Rooted + Relational research initiative, on the theme of Archives, Memory, & the Present Past of Puerto Rico, at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Guzmán applies her collection experience and her commitment to working with and for multiple publics to her object-based inquiry teaching practice. She volunteers on the boards of the Council for Museum Anthropology and the Stowe Center for Literary Activism.

This blog is a repost of a blog for Engagement by the Anthropology and Environment Society, a section of the American Anthropological Association.