Whose Globalization? / Whose Justice?
Schedule
Friday, February 26, morning session (9 am – 12:30 PM)
Working with/on EJ/CJ movements: Beyond Scholar-Activism?
John Foran and David Pellow, Co-organizers
John Foran, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies, UCSB
“After Paris: Building the Global Justice Movement of the Future”
David Pellow, Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies, Professor of Sociology, UCSB
“Environmental Justice and Climate Justice Movements: Collaborations, Contradictions, and Challenges”
Kari Norgaard, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon
“Resisting Colonial Ecological Violence on the Klamath: Relationships, Responsibility and Opportunity in the Face of Climate Change”
Ragina Johnson, Author and Member, International Socialist Organization and System Change Not Climate Change, Bay Area
“Race, Class and Climate: Connecting the Dots, Struggle and Solidarity”
Julie Gorecki, PhD. Candidate, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management UC Berkeley
“‘No Climate Justice Without Gender Justice:’ Towards a Feminist System Change not Climate Change”
Corrie Ellis, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara
“Working Across Lines: Fighting the Frack Attack in Rural Idaho and Santa Barbara”
ann-elise lewallen, Assistant Professor in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, UC Santa Barbara
“Transnational Civil Society and Settler Colonialism in Asia”
11 – 11:15 Coffee
11:15 – 12:30 Discussion
12:30-1:30 Lunch
Friday, February 26, Afternoon session (1:30 – 4:30 pm)
Creating New Fields: Expanding EJ/CJ with scholarship in related areas
David Pellow and John Foran, Co-organizers
Joni Adamson, Arizona State University, Professor of English
“Networking the Environmental Humanities: The International Observatory System”
Julian Agyeman, Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Tufts University (via Skype)
“Cultivating Food Justice”
Shannon Bell, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky (via Skype),
“Climate Justice and the Challenge of Identity Correspondence in Fossil Fuel Extraction Communities”
Traci Brynne Voyles, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies, Loyola Marymount University, “Can a Sea be a Settler? Environment, Justice, and Settler Colonialism in the California Borderlands”
Julie Sze, Professor and Director of American Studies, UC Davis
“In/secure Environments and Climate Justice: Violences and Vulnerabilities of Security”
John Foran, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies, UCSB
“A Few Thoughts on a Sociology of Climate Change/Climate Justice”
3 – 3:15 Coffee
3:15 – 4:30 Discussion
Saturday, February 27, morning session (9:30 am – 12:30 PM)
Tracking Climate Justice and Human Rights after the Paris Agreement of 2015
Richard Widick, Organizer
John Steed, Human Rights Watch (HRW)
“The New Climate Change Initiative at Human Rights Watch”
Katharina Rall, HRW Research Fellow, Health and Human Rights Division (Skype in)
Richard Widick (facilitated discussion): “Climate Justice and Human Rights after Paris, COP21: Strategies for Shaping the Review Process and Implementation of the Paris Agreement”
11 – 11:15 Coffee
11:15 – 12:30 Discussion
12:30-1:30 Lunch
Saturday, February 27, Afternoon session (1:30 – 3 pm)
Roundtable on Oceans/Justice/Representation
Tess Shewry and Melody Jue, Co-organizers
Jennifer Adams Martin, Post-doctoral Fellow, Department of History, UCSB
Summer Gray, President’s Post-doctoral Fellow, UC Santa Cruz
Patricia Holden, Professor, BREN School, and Director of the UCSB Natural Reserve System
Melody Jue, Assistant Professor of English, UCSB
Tess Shewry, Associate Professor of English, UCSB
Janet Walker, Professor of Film and Media Studies, UCSB
Workshop Bios
Joni Adamson is professor of English and Environmental Humanities in the School of Letters and Sciences and a Senior Sustainability Scholar at the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She is the author of American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism (2001), and co-editor of Keywords for Environmental Studies (NYU Press, 2016), American Studies, Ecocriticism and Citizenship (2013) and The Environmental Justice Reader (2002). She served as 2012 President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, the recognized umbrella organization for the global environmental humanities with an active membership of 1800 scholars, educators, students, and scientists in 41 countries. She serves on the editorial boards of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE); American Literary History (ALH), Resilience; and Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. She is a Principle Investigator and lead website developer for “Humanities for the Environment,” an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project linking researchers working in the environmental humanities in the US, Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa. http://hfe-observatories.org
Julian Agyeman is a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, USA. He is the originator of the concept of ‘just sustainabilities’ and is Series Editor of Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice published by Zed Books He was co-founder in 1988, and chair until 1994, of the Black Environment Network (BEN), the first environmental justice-based organization of its kind in Britain. His books include Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (co-edited with Robert D Bullard and Bob Evans: MIT Press 2003), Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice (NYU Press 2005), Environmental Inequalities Beyond Borders: Local Perspectives on Global Injustices (co-edited with JoAnn Carmin: MIT Press 2011), Cultivating Food Justice : Race, Class and Sustainability (co-edited with Alison Hope Alkon: MIT Press 2011), Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice (Zed Books 2013) and Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities (co-edited with Stephen Zavestoski: Routledge 2014) and Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities (co-authored with Duncan McLaren: MIT Press 2015). He is currently working on a book on food trucks.
Shannon Elizabeth Bell is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Greenhouse Environment & Sustainability Residential College at the University of Kentucky. Her research falls at the intersection of environmental sociology, gender, and social movements, with a particular focus on understanding the ways in which environmentally-destructive industries acquire, maintain, and exercise their power and discovering strategies for increasing the political participation of communities most affected by environmental injustices. She is author of Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2013), which received the Association for Humanist Sociology’s Book Award, a silver medal from the Nautilus Book Awards, and was a runner-up at the Green Book Festival. Bell’s second book, Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia will be published with MIT Press in Spring 2016. Bell is the 2013 recipient of the Practice and Outreach Award from the Environment & Technology Section of the American Sociological Association, the Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology and Humanism (also from the Environment & Technology Section of the ASA), the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award, the Rural Sociological Society’s Best Article Award, and Honorable Mention for the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the Environment & Technology Section of the ASA.
Corrie Ellis is a doctoral candidate in the department of Sociology with an Interdepartmental Emphasis in Environment and Society. Her research and teaching passions are climate justice activism, women and gender, labor, and development. She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Idaho and a MA in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her master’s thesis analyzes women’s childcare strategies and labor conditions on a Fairtrade rose farm in Ecuador. Her dissertation explores resistance to extreme energy extraction in three communities in Idaho and in Santa Barbara County, CA, with a focus on activist motivations, political cultures, coalition building, and gender dynamics. She has taught Feminist Climate Justice (co-designed with Sarah Jane Pinkerton), collaborated with the Climate Justice Project to publicize the insights of the global youth climate justice movement, and strives to be a publicly engaged scholar activist, having written pieces in The Feminist Wire and news outlets in her communities. Raised in Idaho, Corrie loves being outside and working to ensure that all people enjoy a healthy and beautiful environment now, and in the future. Corrie is a core member of 350 Santa Barbara and enjoys mountain biking, running, and good food with friends and family.
John Foran is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, teaches courses on climate change and climate justice, activism and movements for radical social change, and issues of development and globalization beyond capitalism. He is the author of Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (1993) and Taking Power: On the Origins of Revolutions in the Third World (2005). He has served as UCSB’s Sustainability Champion, is part of the UC Carbon Neutrality 2025 effort, and is co-facilitator of this year’s Critical Issues in America series – Climate Futures: This Changes Everything. His research and activism are now centered within the global climate justice movement, and can be found at the Climate Justice Project [www.climatejusticeproject.com] and the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory [www.iicat.org]. He is a member of 350.org, the Green Party of California, and System Change Not Climate Change.
Julie Gorecki is a feminist, activist, writer, and published academic. She is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley and Université Paris 8-St. Denis. Currently, Julie’s work and activism focuses on the systemic links between economics (specifically neoliberalism and capitalism), women, minorities, and ecology. She manifests these interests through activist mobilizing, journalistic writing, and engaging in art-focused projects that evoke the intersections between gender, minorities, ecology, and imagining better societies for people and the planet. She has an M.A. in Sociology specializing in the Gender, Politics and Sexuality program from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. She has also instructed several university courses, including an “Introduction to Feminism and Gender Studies” course at Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7). Julie on twitter @JulieGorecki
Summer Gray is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz in the Department of Anthropology. Her current areas of research include climate change and global inequality, with a focus on anthropogenic disruptions at the interface between land and sea. She earned her PhD in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara and is now working on a book, “The Strangled Shore: Life and Death Behind the Seawall.” Summer is also engaged in writing about the Maldives and is working with Azra Naseem and John Foran to publish an edited book, “The Fight for Freedom in the Maldives: Religion, Democracy, Climate Justice.”
Ken Hiltner Ken is a professor of the environmental humanities at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). The Director of both the Environmental Humanities Initiative and the Literature and Environment Center, Hiltner has appointments in the English and Environmental Studies Departments. He received his PhD from Harvard University, where he garnered a number of distinctions as a researcher and Teaching Fellow, including the Bowdoin Prize. He has written a number of books and articles, mostly on Renaissance literature, ecocriticism, and the intersection of the two. Prior to becoming a professor, he made his living as a furniture maker.
Patricia (Trish) A. Holden is a Professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Faculty Director of the UCSB Natural Reserve System, and a departmental affiliate in Mechanical Engineering; Ecology, Evolution and Marine Science; Earth Science; and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Marine Science (IGPMS). She received her Ph.D. in Soil Microbiology (1995) and M. Eng. from U.C. Berkeley, and her Civil & Environmental Engineering M.S. and B.S. degrees from Purdue University and the University of Tennessee, respectively. Holden worked professionally as an environmental engineer for 8 years preceding her doctorate. The broad motivation in her research is environmental pollution: its origins, extents and consequences, and how to manage and prevent it. Her group is particularly interested in microbial processes affecting pollutant fates, but also in microbes as pollutants. Current research projects include: the urban water environment (UWE), integrating spatial relationships between urban infrastructure and subsurface contamination for diagnosing and addressing shallow groundwater micro- and conventional pollutants; origins and fates of microbiological contamination in coastal waters; the distribution and function of bacteria in subsurface soils, including controls on carbon availability and processing; and microbial and plant interactions with manufactured and engineered nanomaterials.
Ragina Johnson is an organizer with the International Socialist Organization and System Change Not Climate Change and author living in the Bay Area. She writes and speaks about Native American liberation, resistance and politics, particularly in relation to climate justice. Her articles on the ecological crisis in California have appeared in Jacobin, Socialist Worker and Truthout. She has been active in movements for LGBTQ Liberation, Palestinian Solidarity, and others against war, racism, and imperialism. Recently, Ragina helped organize the NorCal Climate Mobilization in Oakland, California leading up to COP21 in Paris.
Melody Jue is Assistant Professor of Literature & Environment in the Department of English at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include involve the relation between the environmental humanities, science fiction and contemporary American literature, media theory, and representations of the ocean. She has published articles in Grey Room, Animations: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, and has forthcoming work in Size & Scale in Literature and Culture. Drawing on the experience of becoming a scuba diver, her current book project concerns how the ocean shifts our understanding of critical terms in media theory through its conditions of movement, erasure, and dissolution, and how this new understanding might be brought to bear on questions of cultural preservation and environmental justice.
ann-elise lewallen is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching engages with critical indigenous studies, gender studies, multiculturalism, and environmental justice in the context of contemporary Japan and in Japan’s transnational relations. As a cultural anthropologist, she is also concerned with research ethics and issues of knowledge construction in relation to indigenous and research host communities. She is author of The Fabric of Indigeneity: Contemporary Ainu Identity and Gender in Colonial Japan (School for Advanced Research Press and University of New Mexico Press, 2016), and co-editor of Beyond Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives (University of Hawaii Press, 2014) with Mark Hudson and Mark Watson. Her current book project examines models of sustainable development and environmental justice within transnational citizen relations between Japan and India.
Kari Norgaard (B.S. Biology Humboldt State University 1992, M.A. Sociology Washington State University 1994, PhD Sociology, University of Oregon 2003) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at University of Oregon. Over the past ten years Dr. Norgaard has published and taught in the areas of environmental sociology, gender and environment, race and environment, climate change, sociology of culture, social movements and sociology of emotions. She currently has two active areas of research 1) work on the social organization of denial (especially regarding climate change), and 2) environmental justice work with Native American Tribes on the Klamath River. Both these areas of scholarship have been nationally recognized through the award of research grants, speaking invitations, and coverage of research by high profile media outlets including the Washington Post, National Geographic, British Broadcasting System, and National Public Radio. Her book Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life came out with MIT Press in the spring of 2011. Norgaard is recipient of the Pacific Sociological Association’s Distinguished Practice Award for 2005.
Jen Martin is a lecturer in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching areas include environmental history, history of science, and the oceans. She recently served as the Postdoctoral Fellow for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Sea Change.” She is currently working on a collaborative project on marine environmental justice as well as a book manuscript about Americans’ environmental and cultural relationships with sharks over the twentieth century.
David N. Pellow is the Dehlsen Chair of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His teaching and research focus on ecological justice in the U.S. and globally. His books include: Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park), Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice; and Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. He works with numerous organizations focused on improving the living and working environments for people of color and other marginalized communities.
Katharina Rall is a Researcher with the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch where her current work is focusing on human rights violations in the context of climate change and environmental health. She also researches economic, social and cultural rights more broadly with the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law. Her experience prior to joining HRW includes collaborating with human rights lawyers and communities affected by extractive industries in Haiti, litigation and advocacy seeking accountability from the U.N. for its role in Haiti’s cholera outbreak, and advising members of the German Parliament on human rights and international law issues. Katharina holds a law degree from the University of Göttingen School of Law and graduated from New York University School of Law with an LL.M in International Legal Studies. Katharina speaks English, German, French, Spanish, and some Haitian Creole.
Tess Shewry is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching areas include contemporary literatures, the environmental humanities, water and the ocean, and utopia. She is the author of Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and a co-editor of Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2011). She recently co-organized a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Sea Change,” and is currently guest-editing an Against the Day section of the South Atlantic Quarterly.
John Steed (B.S., 1974, Brigham Young University; J.D., 1977, Harvard Law School) practiced international corporate and commercial law for 30 years, including 10 years as Chair of Paul, Hastings’ Tokyo Office. Shortly after the birth of his first grandson in 2007, he decided his most important responsibility to his grandchildren would be to use his time and energy to preserve as much of the natural world as possible and to leave behind a healthy, sustainable environment. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Community Environmental Council of Santa Barbara, a member of Health and Human Rights Advisory Council and the Executive Committee of the Santa Barbara Committee for Human Rights Watch, and a member of the National Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Julie Sze is a Professor and the Director of American Studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment, and in that capacity is the Faculty Advisor for 25 Stories from the Central Valley. She received her doctorate from New York University in American Studies. Sze’s research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and urban/community health and activism and has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the American Studies Association and the UC Humanities Research Institute. Sze’s book, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, won the 2008 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, awarded annually to the best published book in American Studies. Her second book is called Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (2015). She has authored and co-authored 35 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics and has given talks in China, Abu Dhabi, Canada, Germany, France and Italy.
Traci Brynne Voyles is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at Loyola Marymount University, and the author of Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Voyles received her PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California San Diego in 2010, and was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis in 2011 as part of the Andrew Mellon Environments and Societies Research Initiative. Her research interests revolve around environmental justice, environmental history, feminist theory and gender studies, ecofeminism, and comparative ethnic studies. Her current book project explores the environmental and cultural history of southern California’s Salton Sea.
Janet Walker is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is affiliated with the Environmental Media Initiative of the Carsey-Wolf Center as well as the Environmental Humanities Initiative. A specialist in documentary film, trauma and memory, and media and environment, her books include Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (UC Press, 2005), Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (co-edited with Bhaskar Sarkar; Routledge, 2010), and Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment, forthcoming in March 2015 from Routledge. Her current research concerns documentary and other geolocative technologies for the sensing and charting of alternative media ecologies.
Richard Widick holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he lectured on theory, culture, media, globalization, social movements and environment before moving to the Orfalea Center. He is the author of Trouble in the Forest: California’s Redwood Timber Wars (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), an ethnography, cultural analysis, and social history of the colonization and industrialization of California’s northern redwood region. It is the story of how first the Indian wars and then the labor struggles set the legal, social and ecological conditions for the timber wars of the late 20th century. In new research aimed at further integrating global studies and cultural sociology with media and environmental theory, Widick scales up his institutional analysis of US culture to the international scene of western modernity and the UN climate negotiations. In preparation of a new manuscript—Climate of Empire: Inside the Struggle over Emergent Global Climate Governance—he has conducted conflict-seeking participatory action fieldwork and research videography inside the annual Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where he represented the University of California as an official UNFCCC Observer Delegate with collaborator John Foran (sociology, UCSB) each of the past five years, attending COPS 17-21, respectively, at Durban, South Africa 2011; Doha, Qatar 2012; Warsaw, Poland 2013; Lima, Peru 2014; and Paris, France 2015. See the October 9, 2015 release of Climate Deadline – Paris, December 2015 his first film on the climate negotiations. Widick and Foran are co-founders and co-directors of The International Institute of Climate Action & Theory (IICAT), and publicize their climate-related work at iicat.org.
