Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of Radical Utu: Critical Ideas And Ideals Of Wangari Muta Maathai, Wanjiru G. Mbure

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Natural Dialectics: Māori & Sioux Ecosophy Encounters The Rule Of Law, Robert T.F. Downes

The Journal of International Relations, Peace Studies, and Development

In the age of intensifying anthropogenic climate change, an ecosophical shift is required in the epistemological and ontological comprehension of the interrelations between the human and non-human worlds. This shift is essential for refining existing social scientific approaches to investigating and adjudicating questions of environmental governance, environmental justice, environmental sovereignty, in addition to advancing democratic counters to the effects of ecological degradation and environmental catastrophe that move beyond rigid political-economic constraints. This essay constitutes a novel engagement with discourses of radical democracy and radical ecology that applies the philosophical method of dialectical naturalism to an ecosophical interpretation of the human-nature …

Bikeability Disparities In Orange County, California: Intersection Of Place And Demographics, Jeanette Gritton, Maria Cristina Martinez, Georgiana Bostean, Megan Thiele Strong

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Active transportation modes such as walking and biking are gaining popularity for their extensive health and environmental benefits, yet scholars know little about how place-based accessibility varies by area sociodemographic composition. This study is among the first to examine sociodemographic disparities (by both race and socioeconomic status) in bikeability while allowing for heterogeneity in disparities. Consideration of bikeability disparities is particularly critical within the framework of urban planning concepts that promote equitable accessibility and reduced dependency on automobiles, such as the 15-minute city. Geographically Weighted Regressions examined associations between census tract-level bikeability (using an index that combines five components), socioeconomic …

Chronic Inequities: Environmental & Structural Racism During Covid-19 And Hurricane Laura Disaster Recovery, Tomeka M. Robinson, Sabrina Singh

Critical Disaster Studies

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the realities of systemic health inequities within the United States. While the virus has severely impacted the entire country, people of color bear the brunt of this pandemic, from surges of COVID-19 cases in their communities to spikes in unemployment rates. Simultaneously, citizens are dealing with the impacts of natural disasters such as hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. The common denominator concerning these two stressors is that they can be exacerbated by institutional racism. This can be seen in the case of a small city in Southwest Louisiana, namely, Lake Charles, which has become a …

Seeing Is Believing: Religious Views, Perceptions Of Pollution, And Environmental Attitudes, Katelynn (Sage) Shadoan

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study explores the intersection of religious beliefs, perceptions of pollution, and environmental attitudes among Americans. Drawing upon Lynn White's seminal argument regarding Christian theology and its implications for environmental stewardship, this research investigates the role of biblical literalism in shaping environmental attitudes, particularly among conservative Christians. Using nationally representative survey data and logistic regression models, the study examines how the perceptions of pollution moderate the effects of views of the Bible on environmental concern. The findings reveal that while perceived pollution exposure is strongly associated with environmental attitudes, it does not moderate the association between biblical literalism and environmental …

Review Of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How To Dismantle Systems Of Oppression To Protect People + Planet, Raymond Appiah

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

A Short Supplemental Reading List For The Environment: Issues In Justice, Conflict And Peacebuilding, Ronald Pagnucco

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

On Dialogue And Beyond: Positive Environmental Peacebuilding In Palestine, Elsa Barron

The Journal of Social Encounters

In Palestine, environmental management has been used as a tool of military occupation and oppression. Yet even within that context, many community-based organizations have established programs relating to environmental peacebuilding. Of these initiatives, environmental dialogue programs have received significant attention and resources, even more so since the war in Gaza began in October, 2023. However, a deeper interrogation of these programs reveals the danger that dialogue and collaboration devoid of a critical analysis of power and injustice further perpetuates systemic oppression. Moving these programs into the realm of positive environmental peacebuilding requires a willingness to engage in this structural analysis. …

Islam And The Environment, Jon Armajani

The Journal of Social Encounters

This is a transcript of a presentation at the Thirty-Fourth Annual Peace Studies Conference at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University on September 18, 2023. The presentation provides (1) some background information about Islam; (2) related ideas about Christianity; (3) a discussion of some verses in the Quran, which relate to the environment, and some Islamic interpretations of them; (4) an analysis of Ibrahim Abdul-Matin’s ideas on Islam and the environment; and (5) a tribute to Father Rene McGraw, OSB.

Is Northwest Indiana Prepared To Be A “Climate Haven”?, Luke Carl Jorgensen

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

A Literature Review Of Geographic Representation In Adult Education Research, Angela Kissel

Adult Education Research Conference

The purpose of this literature review is to determine how adult education research is geographically represented by topic and population in three adult education journals from 1998 through 2023.

Review Of Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice, Ava L. Corey-Gruenes

Feminist Pedagogy

Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice, by Hilda Lloréns, highlights Black Puerto Rican women’s efforts to create equitable futures for their communities in the face of capitalism, racism, colonization, and ecological collapse. This review covers key concepts in Making Livable Worlds, including matriarchal dispossession, decolonizing ethnography, the myth of a homogenous Puerto Rico, and myths of inherent economic self-interest. Analyses of these concepts through an absence lens are suggested to enrich formal and informal feminist learning spaces.

Learning To Care For Dangaba, Anne Poelina, Yin Paradies, Sandra Wooltorton, Edwin L. Mulligan, Laurie Guimond, Libby Jackson-Barrett, Mindy Blaise

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

In a Kimberley place-based cultural story, Dangaba is a woman whose Country holds poison gas. Her story shows the importance of cultural ways of understanding and caring for Country, especially hazardous places. The authors contrast this with a corporate story of fossil fuel, illustrating the divergent discourses and approaches to place. Indigenous and local peoples and their knowledge, cultures, laws, philosophies and practices are vitally important to Indigenous lifeways and livelihoods, and critically significant to the long-term health and well-being of people and place in our locality, region and world. We call for storying and narratives from the pluriverse of …

Indigenous Philosophy In Environmental Education, Anne Poelina, Yin Paradies, Sandra Wooltorton, Laurie Guimond, Libby Jackson-Barrett, Mindy Blaise

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The editorial group acknowledges the wisdom of Indigenous knowledge keepers and their past and continuous relationships with place, on every continent on earth where humans have lived for aeons. Indigenous wisdom is their life-giving gift to communities everywhere for planetary futures. It is precious, having integrity and an ethic of responsibility and care. Indigenous wisdom as environmental education is the oldest education, being tens of thousands of years of continuity before waves of apocalyptic colonial violence during the last few centuries interrupted lifeways and language-embedded knowledge systems, some forever gone . . .

Disrupting The Grid: Encountering Fire And Smoke Through Energy Infrastuctures, Deepti Chatti, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Experiences of fires are mediated by energy infrastructures and refracted through social inequality and difference. In California, a state marked by increasingly intense and frequent wildfires, the grid is a source of fire risk, with historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of exposures to wildfire smoke. Drawing on research conducted by one of the co-authors in collaboration with California’s Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribes, this empirically grounded review article expands our understanding of grids. Extant scholarship presents the grid as a networked infrastructure mediating access to energy and one’s relationship to a collective and the state. We extend …

Ecological Solidarity And Sustainable Development In Africa, Ambrose Esigbemi Umetietie

The Journal of Social Encounters

Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own ... This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life (Maathai, 2010). According to John Paul II, the “threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness - both individual and collective - are contrary to the order of creation, an order …

A Mixed Methods Approach To Understanding The Links Between Mining, Climate Change And Selected Health Outcomes In India, Mary J. Cheruvillil

Dissertations and Theses

Despite ample evidence of the significant role that mining activities play in determining health outcomes, in India there is a dearth of comprehensive health studies that draw linkages between mining and health. The purpose of the following study is to investigate the impact of mining activities on population health in India using three different methods: ecological multivariable regression, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and content analysis of government documents using a phenomenological approach. The first aim uses the ecological multivariable regression to examine associations between mining activities and children’s malnutrition outcomes at the district level. Census data, the Demographic Health …

Designing Social Connection: Older Adults And The Infrastructure Of Social Encounters, Bomin Kim

Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design Theses & Dissertations

In recent decades, public space has gained significant attention in both design theory and practice as a critical components of sustainable development for older adults. With growing concerns about social disconnect, economic inequality, and environmental injustice, the revitalization of public space has become a critical piece in creating safe and just cities to foster social connection, health, and resilience for our aging population. I argue in this dissertation that older adults rely on an infrastructure of encounters to navigate social life and that designers and policymakers should critically examine how public spaces distribute and burden labor necessary to create weak …

Beyond The Lines, Miranda-Max De Beer

Masters Theses

Long-held frameworks and philosophies developed over human history have rarely accounted for dynamic flux or shifts between parallel states of being; they’ve ignored the glaring consequences humanity’s brief occupation of the Geologic Timeline will have on the planet. These beliefs have enabled societies to operate through life as if there was no tomorrow, (ab)using the Earth without considering those who eventually reap what’s sown. Beyond the Lines identifies manifestations of the mindset that restricts how we understand living systems and the world around us as so much of what exists in tandem with contemporary society does not adhere to the …

Portfolio For Soci 346: Environmental Sociology, Gwendwr Meredith

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Environmental sociology, SOCI 346, is the study of how social systems interact with ecosystems. As such, it is a very broad course that is tasked with understanding complex and often controversial questions about the social causes, consequences, and responses to environmental disruption. In this teaching portfolio, I enumerate how I use a backward design for crafting assessments that cater to my specific teaching goals and learning objectives for the course. In the first stage of this process, I reflected on what learning outcomes I wished to achieve and determined that structuring the course in modules aligned with the learning objectives …

Slow Speed Rail: The Social, Psychological And Environmental Benefits Of Long-Distance Train Travel, Vincent Gragnani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Long-distance train travel in the United States is slow, inefficient and woefully underfunded. Trains are routinely delayed for freight traffic. Many major cities are served in the middle of the night, or not at all. And the cost of a sleeping compartment is far out of reach for most Americans. This is all in stark contrast to the reliable services offered across Europe and parts of Asia. But for the 3.5 million people who ride Amtrak’s long-distance trains every year, the experience can be a fulfilling one. This web-based project, slowspeedrail.com, explores these benefits, namely, an intimacy with the landscape …

[2023 Winner] The Removal Of Beach Flats Community Garden: A Case Of Environmental Racism, Melissa June Boose, Alexandra De La Cruz Reyes, Palia Vang, Nizhoni Hawthorne

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

The Removal of Beach Flats Community Garden: A Case of Environmental Racism is a podcast that details the plight of the Latinx community in the Santa Cruz County area of the Beach Flats. The community reclaimed an abandoned plot of land over 25 years that was being used for drug deals and prostitution. The community changed it into a community garden celebrating the various cultures from South America. The Seaside Corporation owns the land, which, despite not using it for years, decided in 2016 they would like to reclaim the land to pave a storage parking lot. This podcast details …

Abolition Ecologies And The Making Of Freedom As A Place In Bayview-Hunters Point, Spencer Daniel O'Hara

Master's Theses

In this paper, I critically explore the subjectivities of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard (HPNS), part of the largest redevelopment project in San Francisco since 1906. Applying an abolition ecologies framework, I ask what explains the duplicity of the Shipyard as a site of radioactive contamination and capital accumulation, and in the same time-space one that creates the conditions for radical place-making. Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is a former commercial and military shipyard located on a peninsula in southeastern San Francisco. Motivated by its desire for a major shipbuilding and repair facility to project maritime power in the Pacific, the Navy …

Living And Dying In 'Cancer Alley': Using Human Rights Law And Environmental Justice To Create A Litigation Framework For Marginalized Communities, Neeharika Sistu

Honors Scholar Theses

Cancer Alley, Louisiana is a poignant example of the intersection between environmental justice, legal harm, and human rights abuses. This thesis dissects the laws and policies underpinning the creation of Cancer Alley with special attention to how they constitute human rights abuses under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Then, by performing a comprehensive analysis of litigation surrounding environmental justice in Louisiana, this thesis scrutinizes the efficacy of environmental law in creating environmental justice and suggests the integration of international human rights law and environmental …

Evaluating The On-Site Impacts Of The Ambatovy Project Through The Lens Of Environmental Justice, Nick Karlik

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In Madagascar, sustainable development has been established and maintained by dominant foreign actors to reconcile neoliberalism with globalized conceptions of environmental protection. The Ambatovy mining and refining project has emerged as a prominent example of this developmental mode; Ambatovy is the largest economic enterprise in the history of the country and one of the largest and most productive mining operations in the world, generating billions of dollars in revenue for a country that remains among the poorest in the world while offsetting its impact on endemic biodiversity and forest habitat through conservation initiatives. At the same time, the evaluative framework …

Peace Studies And The Limits To Growth, Selina Gallo-Cruz

The Journal of Social Encounters

150 Peace Studies and the Limits to Growth Selina Gallo-Cruz Scientists have issued increasingly dire warnings about the present and future danger posed by ecological overshoot. Peace scholars’ entrée into this discourse is often through a concern over extractive politics, a central locus for how conflicts are bound up in environmental destruction at the hands of the same industries responsible for ecological decline. Policy and practical responses to the urgent need to scale down production lag behind reality, however, and a global growth-based economy continues to prevail. Here, I explore the dilemmas faced by peace studies scholars who may want …

Working Across Organizational Lines: Grassroots And Grasstops Tensions And Possibilities, Corrie Grosse

The Journal of Social Encounters

The climate justice movement is increasingly stressing the importance of building broad-based coalitions for addressing climate change. Two important elements in these coalitions are grassroots and grasstops organizations. The former bring creativity and flexibility to coalitions whereas the latter bring resources, staff, and specialized expertise. Drawing on 106 in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Idaho and California, this chapter from the book Working Across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction (University of California Press, 2022) analyzes how grassroots and grasstops organizations work to build effective coalitions. Contributing to emergent theory on social movement coalitions, I argue that organizational form, particularly nonprofit’s …

Fixing Prior Consultation For Indigenous Empowerment, Marcela Torres-Wong, Elia Méndez-García

The Journal of Social Encounters

Over the last three decades, extractive conflicts in Latin America have become increasingly violent. Hundreds of Indigenous activists have been murdered for defending their land against extractive interests. The international formula for addressing this type of conflict is for governments to conduct prior consultation procedures with Indigenous communities before affecting indigenous territories. However, the misuse of consultations by governments and companies to legitimize ecologically destructive projects has led a sector of Indigenous organizations to reject prior consultation, while others continue advocating for free, prior, and informed consent. We compare two cases of Indigenous communities from Oaxaca and Yucatán in Mexico …

Extractivism And Conflict: Comparative Study Of Serbia And The Drc, Borislava Manojlovic, Espoir Kabanga

The Journal of Social Encounters

This study explores how populations in Serbia and the DRC have been affected by and responded to natural resource extraction. Specifically, protests and other activist engagement were examined by surveying social movements’ participants from civil society and academia. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of inquiry were used. Data was collected from multiple sources, including academic and online sources pertaining to the topic of extractivism, and a survey of 71 participants. The results indicate that both Congolese and Serbian participants have grave concerns about extractivism and its impact on the environment, peace, stability, health, and well-being but differ in their ability …

Environmental Accountability Of Extractive Industries And Community Resistance In The Wamuzimu Chieftaincy In Eastern Congo, Christian Cirhigiri

The Journal of Social Encounters

Throughout the Congo wars, the pervasive activities of extractive industries have deepened economic inequalities and eviscerated the ecological rights of victimized communities while perpetuating a tragic legacy of gross human rights abuses in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo . Increasingly, however, affected communities are carrying out violent and nonviolent campaigns against mining companies and other extractive industries whose activities jeopardize community livelihoods. Using the analytical framework of collective participation and drawing on qualitative data from 20 semi-structured interviews with community activists in the chieftaincy of Wamuzimu in 2022, this paper argues that community resistance against extractive industries is a …