About Voices in the Dust
Overview
The goal of Voices in the Dust is to break down information barriers that impede environmental justice. Voices in the Dust is a living archive that centralizes, organizes, and summarizes the broad spectrum of information and knowledge on coal dust pollution in Southeast Newport News, Lambert's Point, Norfolk, and other locations facing related issues. Voices in the Dust aims to contribute to collective memory to advance activism against coal dust pollution, center community perspectives, and provide an information infrastructure blueprint for use by environmental justice groups broadly. The goal is not just to preserve the past but also to enable a more equitable future.
What Voices in the Dust Does:
- Centralize knowledge and resources on coal dust in Southeast Newport News and Lambert's Point.
- Amplify voices, featuring photographs, audio recordings, and narratives that describe the material impacts of coal dust and lived experiences of impacted residents.
- Support residents, activists, and advocates in building coalitions, sharing strategies, and affecting policy change.
- Use an open-source platform to facilitate community editing and record-keeping.
- Provide replicability by documenting the development process in a digital guide so others can create similar archives for action.
Development
Voices in the Dust began in 2025 as a place to hold and share the research and resources of the Repair Lab. These resources included photographs and interviews with residents and grassroots activists with transcriptions, government documents, environmental science datasets, legal documents on coal storage and transportation, state and local and model legislation, rules, regulations and standards, maps and operational details at coal export terminals, timelines of activism, correspondences with decision-makers and other organizers, records of public hearings, and news, opinions, and other forms of media.
In the fall of 2026, students at the University of Virginia in Sally Pusede and Kimberly Fields' courses, Air Pollution & Environmental Justice, Introduction to Race, Class, Politics & the Environment, and Environmental Justice in the Mid-Atlantic Region, made contributions to the research shared on Voices in the Dust.
The Repair Lab named the initial version of Voices in the Dust, the "pre-release version," with multiple team members editing under the username: "Repair-lab."
In April 2026, the pre-release version was sent to a samll group of activists and researchers who have or are working on issues related to coal dust pollution for review.
In June 2026, the Repair Lab will fully update Voices in the Dust with all feedback, content, and materials collected during the community peer review to create the "public-release version" of Voices in the Dust.
A critical feature of Voices in the Dust is its dynamic and community-driven design and community-editing functionality. Following the completion of the public-release version, the Repair Lab and African American Historical Society of Newport News will host a series of community archiving and training workshops such that Voices in the Dust becomes a living archive with a local group of editors. These workshops will invite current and former residents to preview, critique, and re-shape the archive. The workshops will serve to train attendees in practices of oral history and to contribute to Voices in the Dust by editing the archive directly to add their own reporting and perspective.
As part of these workshops, we will develop editorial standards and identify an editorial board of Southeast Newport News and Lambert's Point residents to enforce those standards. Editorial standards will be published here as soon as available.
The Repair Lab is currently fundraising in support of hosting these community training workshops, with the hope of raising $30,000. Support Voices in the Dust: Donate
At this time, the Repair Lab welcomes current and former residents to add their voices to Voices in the Dust by submitting testimonials, reporting, photographs, and other informations and/or materials: Add Your Voice
A Repair Lab team member can travel to you to digitize any physical materials that you would like preserved and shared on Voices in the Dust.
Technology
Voices in the Dust has been created using MediaWiki, a free, open-source package that many people have familiarity with via Wikipedia. MediaWiki is secure and scalable, with a dedicated user community that allows for databases to be collaboratively generated and sustained. The Repair Lab is in the process of packaging the technical aspects of MediaWiki, archiving, and indexing in a digital guide so other community organizations can replicate and/or adapt our work to serve their needs. MediaWiki keeps a record of changes so the evolution of Voices in the Dust is preserved.
MediaWiki can be used out of the box, with a small number of visual themes, known in the MediaWiki community as skins, preloaded. We use Vector Legacy for the desktop/laptop theme and Minerva Neue for our mobile theme. After selecting a theme, contributors can quickly and intuitively add text, images, citations, and other content through a visual editor tool. Modest stylizations away from the template are possible through an html code editor, which was done through Voices in the Dust, and the system message pages. Other changes to the appearance were made in the cascading style sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and php files, all of which are publicly viewable: CSS, common.css (desktop/laptop) and minerva.css (mobile); common.js (desktop/laptop) and minerva.js (mobile); and archive.php. We are not web designers, and changes to php files other than LocalSettings.php were done as a last resort, as any MediaWiki version update will require these files to be manually updated. Stylistic changes were made to give Voices in the Dust a more modern style, to make the archive easier to navigate, and to distinguish Voices in the Dust visually from Wikipedia so visitors are not confused as to whether Wikipedia is the source of the information, which it is not.
No generative AI (artificial intellegence) was used to create any page content or identify and reference any sources on Voices in the Dust. Some AI assistance was used to generate code to modify to the CSS, JavaScript, and php files.