This post is part of an ongoing reflection series featuring the 2024–2025 Maguire Public Service Fellows. In his contribution, Ph.D. student Collin Yarbrough shares insights from his Fellowship work—detailing the projects he supported, the communities he worked alongside, and the impact of that work on the ground.
Last summer, through the Maguire Public Service Fellowship, I continued working on a research and advocacy initiative examining the intersections of infrastructure, race, and land use policy here in Dallas. My fellowship project had two primary components: advancing my Ph.D. dissertation research modeling structural oppression in infrastructure development and working with Downwinders at Risk, a local environmental justice non-profit, to understand how their existing advocacy could be expanded by such structural and institutional analysis. Under the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Janille Smith-Colin, our project looked to build tools that help communities and policymakers recognize how structural and institutional forces shape infrastructure. I sometimes describe this work as trying to model the effects of racism rather than race.
My advocacy is rooted in real places here in Dallas: West Dallas, Joppa. You may know part of West Dallas under the name Trinity Groves, where you’ve driven under the now-iconic arch of the Margaret Hunt Bridge to cruise down Singleton Boulevard. And if you’ve driven south on I-45 to Houston, chances are you’ve driven past Joppa, one of Dallas’ freedman’s towns, but probably couldn’t see it past the factories and rail yard to the east of the highway. Neighbors in both neighborhoods are tirelessly organizing for change under the shadow of asphalt shingle factories, aging infrastructure, and hazardous industrial neighbors. For nearly four years, I’ve supported neighbors fighting to remove the GAF and TAMKO shingle plants in West Dallas and Joppa where the physical and economic impacts of disinvestment and environmental racism are daily realities—routines. Residents in both neighborhoods have chronic health problems caused by exposure to particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and other harmful air pollutants which affect the lungs and nervous system. Imagine having to check an air monitor before you and your family decide if it is safe enough to go for an evening walk.
Both factories are best described as legally illegal. They’re “nonconforming uses” which means they’re allowed to be where they are because at one time the land use supported their activities but no longer does. They became nonconforming in 1987. Uses that become nonconforming can stay unless they pose an adverse impact to the surrounding neighbors. If a use is determined to be a nuisance and they’re paid whatever an economist decides is their remaining return on investment since becoming nonconforming, then they close shop. But it has been an immense challenge getting rid of these toxic twins. I served both neighborhoods as both an advocate and policy analyst, helping neighbors navigate what legal and political tools are at their disposal to protect their health and self-determination.
This summer, I found myself reflecting on the seemingly sharp limits of policy and research. What do you do when difficult to grasp forces—often shaped by money, inertia, and fear—block even modest efforts for change? What does it mean for research to “matter” when you’re up against multinational companies with billions in assets and political representatives unwilling to risk their careers for the people most affected? These questions have no easy answers. They forced me to confront the gap between what feels possible in comfort of words and theory and what happens in practice with real stakes on the line.
In academia, we use language like “community-engaged research” or “centering lived experience” as if those things are simple. I’m just as guilty of this as the next well-intentioned person. But I find myself increasingly skeptical: Are we really doing that work—or just gesturing toward it in proposals and publications? I vacillate between apathy and encouragement. On one hand, my work—especially as it critiques infrastructure injustice—is frequently under attack and defunded at the federal level. And yet, I am privileged to continue this work without fear of deportation or immediate physical harm. That awareness makes me even more committed: the infrastructure remains, and so do its impacts, regardless of shifting political whims.
On the other hand, it is my grassroots relationships—the ones built over years in places like West Dallas and Joppa—that ground me. These partnerships—friendships—are deeply meaningful. They remind me that people’s lives are literally on the line, especially in communities burdened by industrial pollution and infrastructural and political neglect. Public service isn’t abstract there. It’s urgent and embodied. I felt this most acutely over the summer as I sat in virtual campaign committee meetings from the safety of my own home and saw the wear and tear years of fighting has taken on my neighbors.
Civic engagement, I’ve learned, is really hard. It takes time—years. It doesn’t yield clean, satisfying conclusions. This summer, I received peer review feedback on an article outlining a theoretical framework for “infrastructure (in)justice,” the foundation of my dissertation. One reviewer urged me to more clearly articulate how time operates differently across scales of oppression—structural, institutional, interpersonal, individual. It was a helpful reminder: injustice isn’t static. Institutions delay: councils, commissions, etc. Structures linger: physical ones like polluting factories, or neglect of a city more concerned with economic development. Communities absorb the harm daily. And still, people resist.
The Maguire Fellowship challenged me to see my work differently—not just as research, but as public service. It’s made me more conscious of how I move between levels of influence: from the grassroots (sitting with residents at community meetings) to the grasstops (working with public officials and large non-profits). I’ve started asking myself more intentionally: What resources, access, or connections do I hold—and how am I using them in service of those most impacted?
One example this summer: While serving on the policy committee for “Fund the Fund”—a coalition pushing for Dallas’ budget to fund the removal of nonconforming uses like GAF—we needed legal clarity on whether tax increment financing could be used to remove illegal industrial uses. I turned to resources provided through Underwood Law Library at SMU to dig into case law and state tax codes. When the City indicated they would use budget reserve funds to pay for removal, a quick pivot was needed. We hadn’t anticipated budget funds to be available, and I turned around an analysis of budget reserve funding types, sources, and amounts so the campaign could discuss a strategic pivot at our meeting a few days later. It felt good being able to serve my neighbors by providing that small level of clarity so they can focus on decision making and not get bogged down navigating byzantine city code and documentation.
This summer reminded me of the tension in trying to bridge complex research methodologies into community work. It was easy to feel like my dissertation work just didn’t matter in the real world. I kept trying to find an angle where there could be some level of service provided by my dissertation research but it never materialized in the way I thought. The more meaningful community engaged research—right now—is deciphering budgets, meeting with council members, and ensuring everyone in the campaign has a clear understanding of what is going on each step of the way. Trying to model racism needed to take a back seat to being in service of fighting racisms direct experiences.
This summer didn’t offer easy answers. But it did offer clarity about my role. About the value of long-term, often invisible work and impacts. And about how public service—real, difficult, ethical public service—requires both endurance and a little bit of creativity. I’m leaving this experience more committed than ever to continuing the fight for infrastructure justice, and more aware of what it means to serve—not just from within the academy, but meaningfully alongside my neighbors living the consequences every day.