A woman in rural Alabama checks a pipe behind her home. It carries raw sewage into a shallow ditch just a few feet from where her children play. With no sewer line and a failed septic system, waste spills out in the open.
In Detroit, families rely on bottled water for cooking and bathing when their taps are disconnected and in Flint, residents conduct their own testing after being told the brown water flowing from their faucets is safe.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re symptoms of a system that unevenly delivers public services, often leaving communities with large marginalized populations behind.
This Pride Month, the MSU Water Alliance is highlighting LGBTQ+ voices in water research — faculty whose work is reshaping how we understand equity, infrastructure and public health. Jennifer Carrera, an associate professor of sociology and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, studies environmental justice and how water and sanitation systems reflect and reinforce broader patterns of inequality in the U.S.
Can you describe your research, particularly its focus on environmental justice and water and wastewater infrastructure?
“I’ve been doing research on water and sanitation access in the U.S. since my dissertation, which looked at septic system failures in Lowndes County, Alabama and water shutoffs in Detroit,” Carrera said. “We generally think of access to water and sanitation as context for low-income countries, but they exist here too — the needs of [the] communities are just a little bit different. When you’re dealing with people who have water shutoffs, that’s different from people who have to travel to collect water.”
In Lowndes County, an estimated 40-90% of households have inadequate or no septic system. Much of the region’s soil is too dense for septic systems to function properly, causing raw sewage to pool in yards, ditches, or the woods directly behind homes.
In Detroit, the city’s aggressive shutoff campaign disconnected tens of thousands of households from water service over a six-year span. Launched in 2014 during a financial crisis, the policy was intended to enforce bill payment. At its peak, shutoffs impacted entire neighborhoods, leaving families without water for drinking, cooking, or sanitation. The campaign eventually sparked a national debate over water access as a basic human right.
Carrera’s research in both rural and urban settings has sharpened her focus on poverty, race and infrastructure — shaping her work at Michigan State University, which now includes long-term collaborations with Flint residents.
“Since I started at MSU, I’ve focused on environmental justice and have worked with Flint residents since 2015 to support their efforts in understanding water-related challenges, environmental health issues and social determinants of health. I also help them access the resources they need to draw conclusions about the situations they’re facing and make recommendations from a community perspective.”
Carrera’s work reflects a community-based participatory research approach, where the people most affected are involved in shaping the research and finding solutions that work for them.
Can you explain some of the benefits of community-based participatory research?
"We’re tremendously privileged to be at a land grant institution,” Carrera said. “Our charge is to serve the public research needs of the people of Michigan — and I focus on low-income populations — so I serve the research needs of low-income populations in the state.”
That charge, she explained, goes beyond conducting research. It’s about building mutual partnerships with the communities her work seeks to understand.
“Some people still see research that focuses on traditional scientific theories or traditional regulatory policy outcomes as ‘true’ science and science in partnership with communities as more activist-oriented. But it’s not,” she said. “There’s an international conversation around the human right to science, which I think is an under-considered perspective. People have a right to ask questions about their own lives and have them answered through systematic, rigorous processes.”
Carrera emphasized that researchers should support communities in understanding and identifying solutions to the problems they face, not attempt to define the problems for communities. That’s one reason why CBPR is so important, she said.
“I might say, ‘Oh, this is your problem,’ when that’s not actually what [you’re] dealing with at the time. During my dissertation, I learned about water shutoffs in Detroit. While that was a tremendous priority for the organizations mobilizing around that issue, by the time I conducted my fieldwork the community was more urgently focused on energy. That year there had been electricity shutoffs and people’s homes didn’t have power. There were a number of fires that resulted in people dying because they were using kerosene heaters indoors to survive the winter. For the community, at that particular time, water shutoffs weren’t the most urgent issue.”
This moment underscores how environmental issues rarely exist in isolation. Water shutoffs, energy insecurity and housing instability often collide, with consequences that can vary depending on your social location.
How do environmental harms like polluted water and failing infrastructure impact the LGBTQ+ community — particularly at the intersections of race, poverty and housing insecurity?
“When we are thinking specifically about issues related to environmental injustices, there are systematic ways certain populations have been physically managed, particularly by the state, that increase their vulnerability to environmental harm,” Carrera said. “In the U.S., that hasn’t historically happened in this way for LGBTQ+ populations, but for racialized populations, a clear example is redlining, which in particular forced African Americans into specific geographic areas, making them more vulnerable to environmental exposures.I often talk about Lowndes County [because] there’s a clear trajectory from slavery through Reconstruction and sharecropping. When Black families were allowed to buy land during Reconstruction, the land that was made available to them was low-quality and less permeable, meaning it couldn’t support functioning septic systems. That land has been passed down through families, so that geographic pattern continues and connects directly to today. Because of historical injustices tied directly to slavery and persistent racial inequities, many Black households in Lowndes County still have failing or non-existent wastewater infrastructure.”
In 2023, the Biden administration reached a civil rights settlement with Alabama to address the decades-long sanitation crisis in Lowndes County, recognizing the lack of proper sanitation in a majority Black community (72.4% in 2024) as an environmental justice issue.
Under the current administration, the agreement was terminated due to a federal ban on DEI initiatives. Alabama’s State Health Officer, Dr. Scott Harris, has acknowledged that wastewater infrastructure problems in Lowndes County need to be addressed, but he has not publicly described those issues in terms of health risks or civil rights since the termination.
The case in Lowndes County reflects a specific racial and geographic history, highlighting how some communities may be more exposed to environmental harms and how those harms are often unevenly addressed.
As Carrera noted, LGBTQ+ populations have not historically been environmentally targeted by the same mechanisms that have shaped environmental harm for Black communities, but questions of whose needs are recognized in environmental policy remain relevant across marginalized groups. The logics that lead to the marginalization of Black and LGBTQ+ populations are interlinked. Further, intersectional impacts exist for Black LGBTQ+ people who have experienced these harms through systems of racial segregation.
This broader understanding of structural harm informs how Carrera approaches her research.
As a researcher and educator, how do you engage with students and colleagues in ways that not only study environmental inequity, but also resist reproducing it?
“The focus of my approach to living the work I do is thinking about dehumanization,” Carrera said.
For her, that means questioning the subtle and systemic ways we distance ourselves from “others” on a daily basis. “There are a lot of ways that we experience and participate in dehumanization to identify ourselves as the group deserving of protection and separate ourselves from the groups we deem ‘not deserving’ of protection,” she explained. “I want to live in a world where everyone has the opportunity to live a life of dignity as they define it. That’s how I approach my work, my students and my colleagues.”
Carrera challenges dominant notions about what counts as science, who gets to ask the questions and how we pursue answers to those questions.
As we celebrate LGBTQ+ voices in water research during Pride Month, we are reminded that equity isn’t about adding voices to a broken system — it’s about rethinking the system itself and making space for everyone to speak for themselves.
This story originally appeared on the Water Alliance website.
