'Bringing these worlds together'
Khalid Osman, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, assesses public perceptions of water infrastructure, water conservation efforts, and the management of existing infrastructure systems.
“I have been part of the environmental justice community at Stanford since I joined the university,” said Khalid Osman, who has been an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford since 2022.
Osman’s research focuses on community-engaged solutions to civil infrastructure challenges, mainly for underresourced communities in need of better water and wastewater systems.
Since 2021, Osman has worked alongside Catherine Coleman Flowers and the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice in Alabama, developing sanitation solutions for communities relying on failing or inadequate systems – what he and his collaborators describe as communities “wallowing in their own waste.”
He attended the “Preferred Futures: Climate and Environmental Justice Across Borders” conference March 23-24 as an audience member, reflecting positively on the “willingness to achieve what is the eventual goal of environmental and climate justice from all sectors,” as demonstrated by the various panelists.
He was also struck by the range of people in the room at this year’s conference. “This year I think was the first time we had such a large number of community organizations and city representatives in the same space with us as academic researchers,” said Osman, who served on the planning committee for the new Center for Just Environmental Futures, which hosted the conference. “Bringing these worlds together is what it’s going to take to achieve environmental justice – that’s why I love coming to these events.”
Osman took away a clear message about what’s possible when those worlds align: “What’s enlightening for me is seeing all these worlds come together and kind of say, ‘Hey, we move at different paces. We think about these problems a little bit differently, but if we can work together, there’s a future that’s going to be really bright as it relates to environmental justice.’”
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