Social Justice Commons^™

Indigenous Water Justice: Theory, Gaps, And Opportunities For Application, Ruby Howard

University Honors Theses

Indigenous people are particularly at risk of water scarcity in the U.S. and abroad, and face high rates of nonexistent or failing water infrastructure, water pollution, pipeline proposals that threaten water resources, and water-related climate change impacts. They also are often unequipped, politically and economically, to react and adapt to these impacts, resulting in devastating health impacts. Due to this widespread insecurity, many scholars are calling for the application of a theory and set of principles known as water justice. However, Indigenous people have pointed out that water justice literature does not focus enough on Indigenous issues, often neglecting the …

Environmental Justice And Carbon Pricing: Can They Be Reconciled?, James K. Boyce, Michael Ash, Brent Ranalli

ETI Publications

Carbon pricing has been criticized by environmental justice advocates on the grounds that it fails to reduce emissions significantly, fails to reduce the disproportionate impacts of hazardous co-pollutants on people of color and low-income communities, hits low-income households harder than wealthier households, and commodifies nature. Designing carbon pricing policy to address these concerns can yield outcomes that are both more effective and more equitable.

It Turned Into A Bioblitz: Urban Data Collection For Building Scientific Literacy And Environmental Connection, Kelly O'Donnell, Lisa Brundage

Publications and Research

In 2013, Macaulay Honors College redesigned its required science curriculum to focus on scientific literacy skills rather than content. Central to this shift was inclusion of a data collection event, a BioBlitz, to provide students with the basis for their own semester-long research projects. Students are teamed with naturalists in an urban green space to find as many species as they can in 24 h and to contribute to a global biodiversity database via the app iNaturalist. We have learned two important lessons: (1) developing an interdisciplinary curriculum with a high degree of experiential learning is more successful when both …

Let Us Be The Fish Who Grow Legs: A Curriculum Guide For Linking Prison Industrial Complex Abolition, Environmental Justice, And State Power, Tess Gibbs

Scripps Senior Theses

This curriculum guide is designed to connect students’ understandings of environmental problems and injustices to their understandings of prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition, with the ultimate intention of cultivating the knowledge and imaginative practices to develop abolitionist-aligned solutions to environmental justice (EJ) problems outside of frameworks that rely upon state sanction. Students will connect the mutual causal forces of environmental injustices and the carceral state; explore intersections of environmental and carceral politics; and finish the course with broadened understandings of humans’ real and unrealized relationships with each other and the more-than-human world. The guide is intended to be worked through …

Radioactive, Internal Colonialism: The Uranium Industry’S Historic And Current Impact On The Navajo Nation, Sophie Arens

Pitzer Senior Theses

The United States withheld information pertaining to the health problems associated with nuclear power, allowing uranium to be extracted, processed, and stored in the Southwest of the United States and more specifically the Navajo Nation. With this, many Diné people who had previously worked in the mines or lived within close vicinity to facilities developed various types of illnesses. This thesis argues that the development of nuclear energy in the United States is a form of radioactive, internal colonialism and that the current waste facility located in Carlsbad, New Mexico is furthering this history into the present day. This thesis …

An Ancient Thread Of “Inseparable Oneness”: A Theoretical Exploration Of Community And Kinship In Grassroots Environmental Justice Movements, Izzy Dean

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis arose from a particular fascination and frustration with the prescribed nuclear family unit and the competitive isolation that capitalism breeds within normative communities, particularly in the United States. In this paper, I use the approach of theoretical exploration combined with case study research to explore the role of community and kinship within grassroots environmental justice organizations. I initially wanted to explore examples of people and groups who found strength and resistance by engaging in “non-normative” or “queer” community-building practices. I have since redefined my topic as a broad theoretical exploration in which I cite theories of non-normativity, among …

Climate Justice And Racial And Gender Equity: Creating And Promoting Featured Collections, Sherry Buchanan

Library Faculty Publications and Presentations

PDXScholar, the repository for Portland State University, showcases three main collections that are automatically curated based on filters – tags that collect and display the content: Climate Justice, Racial and Gender Equity, and COVID-19. In this presentation, I will give an overview of our featured collections, their development and promotion, including the criteria for inclusion, technical aspects, and impact. The Digital Commons automated collection tool and system configuration will be briefly explained.

Between Two Rivers: Environmental Justice And The Politics Of Ecological Improvement In Puget Sound, Grant M. Gutierrez

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Environmental justice (EJ) has become a central framework for historically marginalized communities in the United States to identify unequal exposure to environmental harm. Yet, what once began as a radical social movement challenge to different forms of environmental racism has been taken-up by a wide swathe of civil society across diverse political, cultural, and ecological landscapes. In particular, river restoration efforts – and the many communities they implicate – are emerging as key sites of political-ecological interventions that are central to EJ. However, not all river restoration efforts employ EJ as a guiding framework. Through this dissertation, I ask: how …

Katrina Vs. Ida: A Comparative Analysis Of Fema Housing Recovery Efforts With Regard To Vulnerable Populations, Alyssa Harrynanan

Honors Theses

When Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, it revealed disparities in the way that recovery efforts are handled after storms. For example, it demonstrated flaws in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s attempt to provide housing for disaster survivors. The agency failed to adequately accommodate vulnerable populations, including communities of color, low-income individuals, the elderly, and people with disabilities, in its housing recovery process. Since then, efforts have been made to reform the agency and ensure that all individuals, regardless of race, income, education or disability level, are accommodated by FEMA. However, when Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana exactly 16 years later …

Home/Sick, Elizabeth P. Fontenot

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper is a supporting document that discusses the conceptual and technical aspects of the artworks in the accompanying exhibition, HOME/SICK. The work in the exhibition consists of selections from different series of work that are inspired by related subject matter. The content driving the work responds to anecdotal experiences of people living in communities near oil refineries and chemical processing plants and how events at these facilities affect their way of life. Many times, these are communities of color which strive to voice concerns and protect homes from harmful toxins. In one series, original and appropriated imagery serves as …

An Index Of Community Priorities To Inform Local Governance In New Haven, Max E. Teirstein

Library Map Prize

Environmental justice screening and mapping tools visually depict the distribution of environmental justice burden across a geographic area. How that burden is measured varies according to location—different communities face different challenges, and a mapping tool that represents the landscape of environmental justice in one community may not adequately capture the distribution of EJ burden in another area. Who decides what “burden” means for each community? In this study of environmental justice in New Haven, CT, I argue that it is residents and local community leaders whose perspectives are most critical to how environmental justice is defined. I create a census …

Disability And Climate Change: A Critical Realist Model Of Climate Justice, Molly M. King, Maria A. Gregg

Sociology

Existing literature on climate change as an issue of environmental justice documents the heightened vulnerability of people with disabilities to the effects of climate change. Additionally, there are numerous studies showing that access to information is a prerequisite for perceiving risk and taking action. Building on this work, our review seeks to understand how physical disability relates to perceptions of climate-related risk and adaptations to climate-related events. We introduce a critical realist model of climate justice to understand the relationships between the environmental features that disable, risk perception and information seeking, and adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change. In …

Voices Of The Often Unheard: The Environmental Impacts Of Catastrophic Wildfire Events On Individuals With Developmental Disabilities, Mary Madison Mckenzie

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Thomas Fire for a time was the largest wildfire in California history, burning 281,893 acres and destroying 1,063 structures. Within three years, the August Complex Fire, at 1,032,649 acres, almost quadrupled that record. Climate related disasters such as these have impelled social science researchers to heed calls for a paradigm shift in understanding the risks climate change poses to the social world, in particular, disaster risks for vulnerable groups. Existing research tends to focus on disasters such as hurricanes, featuring risks for vulnerable populations by race, class, and/or individuals with disabilities in general, but not for individuals with developmental …

Addressing The Role Of Climate Change In Agriculture And Mexico-Us Immigration, Xiaoxin Liang

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Among the greatest threats of climate change is the significant impact on mass displacement, particularly as it relates to Mexico-US immigration. Low crop yields from worsening climate conditions have been linked to increased migration of Mexican farmers. With a projected 4.2 million additional migrants in the foreseeable future, it poses a contemporary environmental, social, and political dilemma. This policy brief analyzes several provision proposals to be adopted into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), as evaluated under economic cost, equity, environmental impact, and feasibility criteria. My research concludes that the most effective and direct provision proposal is the implementation of adaptive …

The Imperative For Climate Action At Portland State University, Stephen Percy

Office of the President Publications and Presentations

Portland State University President Stephen Percy announces the formation of the Climate Change Initiative.

Political Processes Of Displacement In Infrastructure Development: The Case Of Aldeia Da Luz And The Alqueva Dam, Cordelia Walz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In 2002, the residents of Aldeia da Luz left their village for the final time, displaced to make room for the Alqueva Dam, a massive regional hydropower and irrigation project almost half a century in the making. The Alqueva Multipurpose Project was marketed by the Portuguese government as a way to develop the impoverished region of the Alentejo and bring innovation to the agricultural sector. The village of Luz was the only physical obstacle to this goal and, therefore, its residents were dispossessed, sacrificed for the development of the greater Alentejo region. However, unlike many other large-scale infrastructure projects that …

Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia, Alaina Claire Feldman, Clayton Press, Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian

Publications and Research

Bilingual catalogue for the exhibition "Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery.

Ecofascist “Snakeoil” And The Imperative Of Racializing Environmental Justice For The 21st Century: A Burkean Rhetorical Criticism Of Contemporary Ecofascist Manifestos, Lantz Shifflett

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Ecofascism of the 21^st century is a revival of centuries-old white nationalist fascism integrated with a concern for environmental issues from the last few decades. Designated by their writers as “manifestos,” three ecofascists have widely disseminated their documents online just before committing acts of racially motivated terrorism in three different countries. Furthermore, these manifestos provide a lens into contemporary ecofascist conspiracies as well as their own concocted “snakeoils” that present their ecofascist agendas in the form of rhetorical “curatives” to environmental issues of pollution. These “cures” are grounded in a new “green nationalism” that attempts to disguise the white …

Evaluating Urban Parks Accessibility And Equity: A Case Study Of Hartford, Ct And New Haven, Ct, Natalie Roach, Mara Tu

Honors Scholar Theses

Public parks provide cities with environmental benefits, positive health effects, recreational opportunities, community building, educational spaces, and public amenities. However, certain populations have been systematically denied their fair share of these benefits because of unjust practices in the creation and maintenance of urban parks. With a lens of environmental justice, the goal of this research was to assess park quality and accessibility of two Connecticut cities, Hartford and New Haven, by gathering publicly available information as well as using GIS tools.

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) has an existing ParkScore rating system that evaluates the quality of a city’s …

The Amungme And The Environment: Environmental Justice History And Consumerism, Kole A. Dawson

Phi Alpha Theta Pacific Northwest Regional Conference

The Amungme are one of hundreds of Papuan people groups who lived in the Indonesian province in New Guinea for thousands of years. This group subsisted in their environment by hunting, cultivation of small crops, and practicing pig husbandry. In the late 1960s, seeking foreign capital to boost the nation’s economy, the president of Indonesia signed a contract with Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold. Freeport began mining in the early 1970s, eventually opening one of the world’s largest gold mines. Excavating sacred Amungme sites, Freeport’s massive pollution to the land and water destroyed the indigenous people’s environment both spiritually and …

Environmental Social Justice Issues And Health Risks In Younger Kids From Vulnerable Communities In The United States: Educating Youth Of Immigrant Communities To Address Social Justice Issues, Shilpa J. Kulkarni

Community Engagement Student Work

This project was conducted to examine the environmental social justice issues in the United States and how they are linked to health issues in younger children in low-income communities and people of color through the lenses of multiple theoretical frameworks. The workshop was focused on educating youth from other communities of people of color, providing them resources so that while bridging the cultural gaps they will become allies. The targeted audience was Asian-Indian youth of Maharashtrian communities across the country. The youth of mixed age group and first and second generations of immigrants from those communities participated in the workshop. …

‘The Environment Is Us’: Settler Cartographies Of Indigeneity And Blackness In Prophecy (1979), Kali Simmons

Indigenous Nations Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the triangulation of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the ‘creature feature’ sf-horror film Prophecy (Frankenheimer US 1979), arguing that the film’s renderings of environmental racism ultimately function to justify white supremacist hetero-patriarchal maintenance and surveillance of Black and Indigenous lands and bodies. A close examination of Prophecy’s representational and ideological shortfalls – in particular its renderings of Black and Indigenous maternity – reveals troubling entanglements between settler-colonial logics of geography, ecology, monstrosity, and subjectivity.

Centering Equity In Oregon’S 100 Year Water Vision: A Student-Led Policy Paper Prepared By The Oregon Water Stories Team At Portland State University, Clare T. Mcclellan, Sadie Boyers, Victoria Cali De Leon, Tony Cole, Laura Cowley-Martinson, Shersten Finley, Dustin Lanker, Julia Seydel, Aakash Nath Upraity, Janet Cowal, Melissa Haeffner

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this report is to provide evidence for the need to further intentionally incorporate equity into Oregon’s 100 Year Water Vision. Four case studies contextualize this need and highlight the variety of water issues throughout the state, supported by linguistic analyses of local newspapers. As Oregon policy-makers are responsible for ensuring working water systems for all Oregonians, we also suggest implementable criteria for the evaluation of equity in water issues and decision-making. This student-led and interdisciplinary report comes from the Haeffner-Cowal Oregon Water Stories research lab at Portland State University.

Urban Green Space: Mitigator Or Multiplier Of Inequality In The Denver Metropolitan Area?, Joshua Charles Baldwin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Studies have shown that communities of color and low-income populations are likely to live in neighborhoods that lack access to quality green spaces, unable to directly benefit from the environmental, recreational, and cultural services they provide. The goal of this research was to determine if the green space inequality patterns seen globally and nationally exist in the Denver Metropolitan Area. Using an existing green space dataset, ecosystem services fieldwork, GIS digitizing, and bivariate correlation analysis I uncovered numerous green space inequalities based on proximity, acreage, and quality. Key findings included 1) Lakewood’s Hispanic and less-educated populations have relatively little access …

From Colonial Agriculture To Community Resilience: A History Of The United States Gulf Coast, 1718-2005, Olivia Champion Johnson

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Engaged Communication Scholarship For Environmental Justice: A Research Agenda, Chad Raphael

Communication

As a discipline of crisis and care, environmental communication needs to address questions of environmental justice. This article argues that the most appropriate approach to studying environmental justice communication is engaged scholarship, in which academics collaborate with community partners, advocates, and others to conduct research. The article reviews prior engaged communication scholarship on environmental justice, and proposes four streams of future research, focused on news and information, deliberation and participation, campaigns and movements, and education and literacy.

What The Gorilla Saw: Environmental Studies And The Novel Ishmael, Ian Drake

Department of Political Science and Law Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The novel Ishmael, a late twentieth-century text, demonstrates how fiction can provide philosophical, political, and moral commentary on humanity's interaction with the environment. Daniel Quinn's 1992 novel offers an example of discourse on environmental ethics and its utility as a way of engaging college students in the study of environmental issues. Ishmael reflected and proposed to address some of the fears of environmental degradation and was the recipient of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, which was a one-time award providing a $500,000 prize (McDowell).1Ishmael was generally favorably reviewed in major print media, including The New York Times and Los …

Introduction To Empowered Partnerships: Community-Based Participatory Action Research For Environmental Justice, Christopher M. Bacon, Saneta Devuono-Powell, Mary Louise Frampton, Tony Lopresti, Camille Pannu

Environmental Studies and Sciences

This article introduces a special section on empowered partnerships that deepens a dialogue initiated during the 2010 symposium titled EmPowered Partnerships: Community-Based Participatory Action Research for Environmental Justice. The articles in this section will be divided between issues 1 and 2 of the Journal. After briefly reviewing the definitions and the steps associated with community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), we identify the synergies connecting the underlying principles and values of the environmental justice (EJ) movement and CBPAR. The principles-based comparison is part of an ongoing effort to craft a framework that produces research partnerships that are simultaneously more responsive to …

Environmental Justice And The Role Of Social Capital In An Underserved Urban Community, Lorraine Ann Dillon

Community & Environmental Health Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate a community's beliefs, attitudes, and experiences regarding their neighborhood's environmental health issues and the ways in which individuals utilize social capital (the degree to which a community collaborates and cooperates) to improve their environmental health. Research correlating social capital with health status shows that the higher the level of social capital in a community, the better the health. An understanding of why some groups exhibit more social capital than others is important in improving the public health system. The study was accomplished by comparing a convenience sample of two specific groups …