Sibyl Diver has been curious about the connections between people and place since she first traveled from rural, coastal Delaware to attend Stanford in the 1990s. Today, the interdisciplinary environmental scientist explores those connections in communities surrounding campus and beyond. 

Diver, a lecturer in the Earth Systems Program in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a recipient of this year’s Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching, creates opportunities for Stanford students and researchers to support and learn from communities. Here she talks about the importance of sustained, local research relationships and how academic inquiry can lead to positive societal impacts. 

Your focus is community-based research. Can you explain what that means? 

It’s a very particular methodology that links scientific research and community leadership, where we ask critical questions about what’s happening in society and sustainability. This means we partner with a community member in asking and answering questions together in a way that is relevant to the situation and challenges that they’re facing. You can do community work in all kinds of ways, but for me, it’s central to how I do research. In this case, what makes the research rigorous, relevant, and impactful is working in a particular place with a particular set of people. The community impact work and the research go hand in hand and shape one another. 

Sibyl Diver along the Klamath River with Robyn Reed of the Hoopa Tribe. | Dan Sarna

How does this work impact communities? 

Local and Indigenous communities know a great deal about what is happening in their place, and can tell you exactly what issues are most relevant for them. They have their own leadership structures for affecting change, even if that leadership has multiple centers and is not always visible to outsiders. And place-based communities also have a long-term interest in carrying forward initiatives that advance their social and ecological well-being over time – an interest that will persist long after a researcher has completed their study and moved on. For this reason, communities may wish to learn how to do the research themselves through what is sometimes called a “citizen-science” approach. 

How does your work apply to local communities? 

Housing, labor, and transportation are some of the most pressing environmental justice issues we have in the Bay Area. To engage with local environmental justice issues, I started a class in partnership with my students called the Just Transitions Policy Lab, which conducts community-engaged learning projects with local organizations. Students in the course learn about environmental justice and what community organizing looks like. I also do community-engaged research on indigenous water governance, and I co-direct the Environmental Justice Working Group here at Stanford with Dr. Emily Polk.

Your research on water governance with the Karuk Tribe in the Klamath River region near the California-Oregon border is focused on dam removal, which led to the return of spawning salmon to the Klamath last fall. How did that come about? 

I got invited to work on tribally-led research on the Klamath because I was working with Indigenous communities on salmon protection in the Russian Far East, so I had knowledge of the environmental politics that were presenting huge challenges for sustainability and cultural protections. It was remarkable how many issues were shared between Indigenous communities in Russia and tribes on the Klamath. 

When I started my collaborations with the Karuk Tribe, my work included research, but I was also engaged in capacity building by connecting them with other scholars interested in the tribal community’s research needs. It was exciting for PhD students to get involved in tribally-led research because they could learn about pressing problems and sustainability solutions in the context of what tribes like the Karuk are doing to revitalize their ancestral land bases, which is central to my ongoing academic-tribal research collaborations in the Klamath. The study we just completed with the Karuk Tribe, which conducts a social impact assessment of Klamath dam removal for tribal community well-being, is a good example of this kind of research collaboration.

How do you help groups and communities see the benefits of participating in the research? 

Learning how to work respectfully with tribes through a long-term research relationship is not an easy thing to do. There’s a difference between folks who dip their toes in and folks who really take a relationship-building approach toward respectful, tribal-academic research over a longer time period. It takes a long time to build a research relationship. One thing we often say is that ’you go slow so you can go fast.’ This means you start by taking the time to build the trust that establishes a solid research relationship. Later on, collaboration can occur more quickly and easily, so you can do some pretty amazing work together over time. It’s awesome when you have support for that long-term partnership.

How does this work make a difference at Stanford? 

When universities are able to figure out how to conduct community-based research, it can lead to really impactful and meaningful collaborations that generate mutual benefits. It increases the capacity for collaborative research that addresses the most relevant issues for tribes or community groups. There’s also a huge benefit to students and folks in the academy that arises from being able to learn how to work with multiple knowledge systems. This includes learning how to bring an additional layer of humility to knowledge production, which can be a pretty rich experience when you expand beyond some of the more insular academic knowledge production traditions to include practice-based knowledge, indigenous knowledge, or knowledge coming from rural communities. It expands your worldview and your awareness of the types of problems there are to engage with, and enables you to think more deeply about who benefits from that work.