Community–university partnerships are often regarded as promising strategies for addressing environmental injustices. Yet, community partners often bear substantial emotional labor as they confront bias and knowledge hierarchies, navigate unfamiliar academic norms, and manage administrative hurdles. As this labor can reproduce epistemic, social, and environmental inequities rather than transform them, attending to how these partnerships generate emotional work for community partners is essential to foster healing relationships.

Drawing from feminist theories of knowledge production and procedural justice as a principle of environmental justice, we highlight the significance of emotions and marginalized standpoints that emerge from histories of abuse and discrimination. We use the concept of emotion work to illuminate this type of labor and analyze the complex asymmetrical power dynamics inherent in these types of partnerships.

We focus on the Environmental Justice (EJ) Leaders Program, which has engaged 24 fellows from diverse organizations over 4 years in 9-month knowledge exchanges with the University of California, Davis researchers. The authors, who include program managers and one EJ Leader from each of the four cohorts, bring different positionalities that inform their analyses. They reflect on their respective experiences within the program and the emotion work each performed as the program evolved.

Program managers and researchers can lessen the emotional labor of community partners by fostering their own emotional wisdom. By listening to community partners’ concerns and moving through conflict with honesty and vulnerability, program managers and researchers can challenge knowledge hierarchies and foster greater inclusivity and respect for their community partners’ experiences and contributions.

We advocate for university partners to develop a deeper appreciation of the unequal emotion work required to foster these relationships. We raise the importance of centering community partners’ subjective experiences to create more equitable knowledge production practices capable of addressing environmental injustices.