We asked contributors to this book to reflect both practically and theoretically on their engagement with struggles for environmental justice and how these connect to community development and popular struggle. As academics or activists, all provide rich reflections on these processes. The process of producing the book has been a joy, although not without its difficulties. The contributors are all engaged in some way with struggles against the exploitations of neoliberalism. Activists constantly operate to time-scales determined by the situation in which we and our comrades find ourselves. Academics in all parts of the world also face the sustained imposition of neoliberal practices on our working conditions. It is important to protect the space in which university employees engage with committed scholarship in solidarity with communities of struggle, as well as engaging with struggles in which our own labour is expropriated; and this book has facilitated this. It has been a privilege to work with such a range of committed activists and scholars.

Many of the chapters have been co-produced, a process that has been a generator of new insights. Co-production has been informally shaped by a discipline of Freirean dialogue. Eurig, working as an activist-academic with a range of friends and comrades from India, Palestine and Scotland, found that the production process – the dialectical integrity of content and narrative, experience and theory, urgency and reflection – has taken a different form with each. In the cases of Scottish-based activists Jennifer, Kathy and Sara, as a co-activist Eurig was able to participate in discussing the chapters prior to editing, but their chapters are essentially their work. Kathy and Sara's Chapter Twelve is in itself a significant contribution to the struggle, involving detailed discussions with a wide range of community-based, trade union, anti-toxics and environmentalist groups engaged in the contradictions of class struggle over environmental health in the workplace and community. The production of the chapter has thus made a contribution to developing the grassroots network on occupational and environmental health struggles that was proposed at a conference between the Asian and the European movements a few years ago.

Many of the chapters began as dialogues between two or more of those involved in a struggle or acting in solidarity.