Behind the Lectern: Erica Walker

Thanks for being with us Professor Walker. Please tell us how you first became interested in studying noise pollution.

Well, I think I was born in noise pollution. I grew up in a very small town in Mississippi, and people would think that a rural town wouldn't have a lot of sound issues, but I lived right next to two major highways, and two major railways, so noise was a 24-hour part of my childhood soundtrack. 

I grew up very poor, and as I got older I knew I wanted to escape the poverty that was associated with Mississippi, so I ended up moving to Boston to go to school, kind of forgetting my past. I became an artist, a working artist, and I had a studio, which was my apartment.

But then I had this experience living in my basement apartment: neighbors moved in above me with two small kids who used to run across their floor, which was my ceiling, 24 hours a day. That kind of triggered some ghosts from my past.

It drove me insane. I was trying to get them evicted. I was collecting evidence about when they were being loud, how loud they were being, the times of day, because I wanted to take them to small claims court. Through that process, somebody put their hand on my shoulder and said, I think you would like this field called public health.

You had been working on noise issues in New England for some time when COVID hit. How did the pandemic change your research trajectory?

During COVID, when I was looking at what communities were hardest hit, I noticed that my home state of Mississippi was one of the communities early on that was hard hit with COVID, and it kind of made me think.

I had been working in a place (Boston) where it was easy to find an expert in the field that you needed. Communities were engaged, there was data, there was access to lots of things. My success was baked into the infrastructure. But what if I did something in my home state of Mississippi? Would my work be successful?

So I started to rethink my research strategies, my research methodologies, by wanting to work in a place where things shouldn't work. And I just decided, I want to work in my home state, where success isn't baked into the infrastructure, where there is huge amounts of disinvestment, and not a lot of community engagement. I knew that things probably wouldn't work out. But I thought that it would be better for me to direct my resources to my home state because it needed a lot of work, and to challenge my ideas of what successful research looked like. 

So during COVID I decided to reframe, to go back to my home state of Mississippi.

But when you got to Mississippi, folks there were not so interested in noise pollution.

People in the community were like, Yeah, we're not really interested in noise. We're more interested in our failing water system. So that made me rethink everything. Do I go into this place and listen to the community and try to pivot to address the issues that are concerning to them, even though they aren’t in my wheelhouse of expertise?

People had brown water coming out of their faucets. And at that time we were telling people to get vaccinated. We were telling people to do all of these things, but we were ignoring some of those issues on the ground. And so for me, I wanted to understand what was happening on the ground and I pivoted to address those needs.

Tell us more about Jackson, Mississippi’s water crisis.

Just before COVID, there were rumblings that the water system was crumbling. This was due to disinvestment in the infrastructure and I think a lot of people just assumed that the city's residents wouldn't demand more or demand better. By the time I got there, the water system had failed and people were really concerned about the water quality.

We held a series of meetings and people asked ‘Can we figure out what's in our water? Can we get education on what's in our water? We hear people from the EPA or from the local government talking about things like pH levels, dissolved oxygen, turbidity. We don't know what these things mean. Can you help us make sense of all of this information that's being thrown at us?’ 

For me, it was ultimately a no brainer. We had to pivot.

When you go back in history and think about all the great pioneers and explorers who found new territories, I think they had to pivot. I think that pivoting is a fundamental part of the creative process. It's a fundamental part of idea generation. It's a fundamental part of science. Many times through the scientific process we have to pivot, so public health is no different.

Did the University support you in that pivot?

Yes, surprisingly. I had just gotten a grant to look at air pollution and noise pollution in Mississippi, so I reached out to Brown University to see if they could assist, and they said Sure, what do you need? I said I need the space to be able to be creative about this. And I need the financial support to actually pull it off. I need to order 1,000 water quality tests, which aren't cheap. The answer was yes. I would like to create an activity book series that walks people through the process of what's in their water. They said yes. So I was very appreciative of that. Then the following year, an O. V. P. R. Seed Award was very instrumental to launching an epidemiological study, the first of its kind, in Greater Jackson, Mississippi. 

I think Brown was the first place where I felt like they appreciate the creative process. And I think that they also appreciate what I call non-academic products. At a lot of institutions it's that ‘publish or perish’ mentality. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist here, but for the first time I've heard conversations about these non-academic products being an important part of the promotion process.

When I had my annual review with my department chair, I slid the activity books across the table, and it wasn't like, ‘What is this?’ It was like, ‘Oh wow, this is amazing!’ And I've never heard that before. All of my approaches until I got to Brown were, ‘You're not a community organizer, you're a scientist.’ Or, ‘You are a community organizer, and you're not a scientist, and you need to find somewhere else to go.’ So this was the first place where I felt like I could dream, and I could implement, and it could be considered valuable. 

Should I propose this? Should I be like this? Should I wear this? I've never had those questions since I've been at Brown. I've never had to question who I am, how I think, what I wear, how I speak. I just feel very accepted here and I feel like if there's something that I don't agree with, like I don't agree with a lot of the ways that we handled COVID, I feel like I can say that and be heard without retaliation or retribution.

I think that for the most part, wherever you are, people are afraid to be wrong. People are afraid to acknowledge mistakes and people are afraid to pivot from preconceived beliefs or prior beliefs. Brown is just a special place where I've met a community of people that aren't afraid to do those kinds of things.

So at Brown, at least, it is possible to really work with communities and be a scientist.

I had this great pivot, and ended up doing a bunch of non-academic work, releasing a lot of non-academic tools, operating a mobile tap water testing lab, creating community reports, creating workbooks, creating a summer research series where we worked with community colleges and high school students. These are not all promotable products, but at the same time, I was also able to publish in highly reputable journals, so I think you can do both. But if you're in a place where you can't do both and you want to do both, then for me, that's not your home. You have more searching to do. You have a home that's waiting for you, you just have to find it.

Moving back to Jackson: the city’s water has improved. Did your team’s presence make a difference?

I think our presence there, knowing that we were testing water, that we were educating residents about what was in their water, I think just knowing that there is an unbiased but accountable entity there really helped to make sure that they were testing, testing regularly, and informing residents. So I think we helped shift the narrative from apathy, to, 'Okay, we’ve got to do something about this.’ 

And we're educating people. Because, the residents are the ones who are ultimately going to have to hold their elected officials accountable.

When community residents tell us that the water administrator went on TV and told them about the status of their water to date, and that they can understand terms like turbidity or pH, and where their water comes from and the implications of boiling water, that is very rewarding.

These are things they didn't know before. So we’re giving them information, and educating them so they can take on the advocacy. Just seeing people ask you for things, and feel comfortable enough to ask you for things, has just been amazing. When I grew up in the community, we just sort of accepted what was happening around us as status quo. So even seeing people wanting to advocate for change and trusting us to be a part of that process is very amazing.

We're in a community in Mississippi now that is dealing with pollution from wood pellet plants and we have air pollution monitors and noise monitors in these communities on utility poles and things like that. And a retired woodworker made us little boxes to put the air pollution monitors in, which has cut down on time. So, just seeing people really wanting solutions for their community and wanting to play an important role in that process has just meant everything to me. 

I think because we leaned in with an issue that was very important to the community at the time, they saw that we showed up, we did what we said we were going to do, and we followed through to the end and we're still there. That provided a level of trust, so residents began to become curious about other parts of our project. They began to make connections: Our water's this way. What are our noise levels like? What is our air pollution like? Is there a relationship? 

So we didn't have to force them to figure out these environmental questions. They were willing to work with us to put these different pieces of the project together. 

And have any ghosts been put to bed?

I'm from Jackson, Mississippi, born and raised there. So when the residents told me that they had other concerns, it sort of brought me back to my childhood when there were people that would swoop in and carry out their agendas, but would never follow through, they would never return, and our lives never changed for the better.

So when they told me that they had other priorities, I knew that that was a time for me to listen and kind of go back to that younger version of myself that always wondered, well, what is the point of all of this if it's not gonna improve our lives?

So I had an opportunity to address some ghosts of my past and for me that was important because I'm from there, my family still lives there, when I go home I still go to church there, these are my people. What they need, for me, is more important than anything that I'm doing at the moment.

Based on this experience, what’s your advice for public health researchers who work in communities?

I think they have to come in, not with an agenda, but with an attitude of service. What can we do for you? We have all of these tools. We have all of this expertise. We have all of this knowledge. How can we leverage these resources to work on a problem that's meaningful for you?

And I think that's one of the things that we didn't do well during COVID. We said, these are the things that you need to do. And as a result of that, we neglected to see the bigger picture. We neglected to ask people what they needed. And we neglected to understand what was happening on the ground. And we were unable to see that a lot of the things that we were suggesting that people do were impossible. I mean, how do you get someone to prioritize a vaccination when they have brown water coming out of their faucets? 

So I think listening should be the first step. And not only listening, but implementing what you heard. I don't think we do that enough. We really need to remember that ultimately we are in service to the community and not to our careers. And so I think that when we refocus that, I think that our outputs are just that much more meaningful. 

We always hear in staff meetings and faculty meetings that we want things to be sustainable. The way to be sustainable is to make sure that you are actively working on issues that people care enough to invest in.

For me, the lesson is working on problems that matter to the community and thinking about products that lean more on public health than publication health. So thinking about products that are meaningful to the communities that you serve. Which could be an academic publication, but it could also be an activity book.

It could be an event where they can vent. It could be hiring local students to carry out the work. It could be so many different things.

How does your artistic background make its way into your work today?

I'm an academic researcher, but I do all my clip art for my presentations. I did illustrations for my activity books. So I haven’t left those identities, I just infused them into who I am now. Hopefully I try to make the work relevant, or more accessible. I'm just repackaging things in a way that is meaningful for now. I'm very much an in-the-now kind of person. I want to make sure that I'm always in touch with the most important issues on the ground.

When you're an artist, you have to pivot constantly. So I don't think I'm any different than I was before I got into this. I'm still an artist, but now it's being repurposed into public health. 

Public health gave me the toolkit to understand a lot about my prior life. So I grew up in a very rural town, heavily polluted, really loud, bad air quality, bad water quality. And people in the community had this assumption that it was something about our environment that was making us sick, but it always stayed more in conspiracy theory territory. But with public health, I was able to utilize tools to actually make those connections. Public health gave me a set of skills to actually make the connections between how I grew up, or how people grow up and live in their environments, and how it impacts their health. 

In addition to being an artist, and a researcher and a community organizer, you are also a teacher.

I teach a very hands-on class where we actively work on community issues. My students will say, I just don't have the tolerance anymore for a class where the professor is going to get up and lecture for an hour, and it is not connected to something tangible. 

So I think the students are thirsty for tangible, meaningful, accessible, important issues. And they are often the drivers of ideas. I like to think I'm open-minded, but I'm definitely not as open-minded as the younger generation because they come with a different set of experiences. They're always challenging us to do and be better, which I appreciate because I never assume that my process is the correct process. That's part of what I like about being in academia: the students keep me on my toes.

At the school’s 10 year anniversary, what is your hope for public health at Brown?

I hope that we would really, really, really start to prioritize listening to the world directly around us, hearing people's concerns, hearing people's needs and actually acting on those things. We have so many skills, so many resources in this institution and there's no reason why we shouldn't be actively addressing community issues in real time. So I hope that we can be more outward facing, from our offices, from our classrooms, and really interact and engage with the world around us, and realize that we have the tools and resources to literally make the world a better place.

And we just have to start, we have to move from thinking inward to thinking outward. Really leaning into the public in public health. And it's not just getting on TV and telling people what to do. It's not signing a petition. It's not writing a grant and getting millions of dollars of funding. It is actively servicing the communities that we are in. Whether it's Providence, because we're here, or Mississippi. I hope we're actively connected to the places that matter to us because they are ground zero. 

Would public health exist if there was no community? I don't think so. Community is important because they can tell you what you need to focus on. They can tell you when you're doing things right. They can tell you when you're doing things incorrectly. They can tell you about future things to look out for.