Liz Carlisle is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at University of California, Santa Barbara, where her work focuses on fostering a more just and sustainable food system. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard University, and she formerly served as Legislative Correspondent for Agriculture and Natural Resources in the Office of U.S. Senator Jon Tester. Recognized for her academic publishing with the Elsevier Atlas Award, which honors research with social impact, Liz has also written numerous pieces for general audience readers, in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. She is the author of two books about transition to sustainable farming: Lentil Underground (winner of the 2016 Montana Book Award) and Grain by Grain, coauthored with farmer Bob Quinn. Research Dr. Carlisle's research program focuses on sustainability transition in the food system, and she works closely with farmers to understand both barriers and opportunities for scaling out agroecological management of farmland
Alenda Y. Chang is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. With a multidisciplinary background in biology, literature, and film, she specializes in merging ecocritical theory with the analysis of contemporary media. Her writing has been featured in Ant Spider Bee, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Qui Parle, the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, and Ecozon@, and her first book Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, December 2019), develops ecological frameworks for understanding and designing digital games. Along with Film and Media Studies professor Laila Shereen Sakr, Chang is also the co-founder of the digital media studio Wireframe (Music 1410). Wireframe was established to support collaborative and cutting-edge research and teaching in new media, with an emphasis on global human rights, social justice, and environmental concerns. Located adjacent to the Digital Arts and Humanities Commons, the studio provides a space for production and critical engagement across media including games, data visualization, installation art, virtual/augmented reality, projection mapping, performance and installation, livestreaming, 3D modeling, mobile apps, and social media.
John Foran is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also involved with the programs in Latin American and Iberian Studies, Global and International Studies, Environmental Studies, and the Bren School. He was visiting professor of sociology and Latin American Studies at Smith College from 2000 to 2002, and Visiting Professor of Sociology at Goldsmith's College, University of London, from 2009 to 2010. His current areas of intense focus and interest include the climate crisis, 21st-century movements for radical social change, and sustainable development or “building better futures.” His books include the multiple award-winning Taking Power: On the Origins of Revolutions in the Third World (Cambridge, 2005), in which he presents a new theory of the causes of revolutions in Latin America, to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, spanning the period from 1910 to the present, and a comprehensive Marxist history of Iran up to the revolution: Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (Westview, 1993; available as a free pdf). His six edited or co-edited volumes touch on issues of revolution, radical social change, and women, culture and development, and can be found on his cv, along with numerous other publications. He is currently working on a book, Taking Power or (Re)Making Power: Movements for Radical Social Change and Global Justice, which assesses the new forms of such movements as the Zapatista and Kerala experiments, the global justice movement, the Pink Tide in Latin America, the global Occupy movements, the Arab Spring, and his new passion, the global climate justice movement. His reports and essays on the global struggle for climate justice can be found at the websites of the Climate Justice Project and the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory. He is involved in an initiative of activist scholars and others on the UN climate treaty negotiations, which can be found at http://www.parisclimatejustice.org/
I am a critical geographer exploring the intersections of global climate change policy, conservation, markets and justice. My work asks how, and by whom, climate and conservation policies are enacted. Recently I've been studying the climate tech space, particularly as it relates to carbon offsets. I am a Visiting Researcher at the Environmental Justice / Climate Justice Hub of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. I also maintain a research affiliation with CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research In Environmental Sciences at CU Boulder. And I teach about climate change at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Summer Gray is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on infrastructure, adaptation, and the environment. She is also a founding member of the Climate Justice Project at UC Santa Barbara and a DIY filmmaker. Prior to joining the Environmental Studies Program in 2017, she was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Research Summer’s research is focused on connecting practices of shoreline stabilization with the emerging and uneven geographies of sea change, especially in low-lying countries and island nations. Her work highlights the lived experiences of coastal communities throughout the world facing the threat of sea change and the unintended consequences of coastal development and sand mining.
Ken Hiltner 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. He has served as Director of the Literature and the Environment Center, Director of the Early Modern Center, and Chair of the Graduate Program. Prior to becoming an English professor, he made his living as a furniture-maker. As a second-generation woodworker, he received commissions from five continents and had collections featured in major metropolitan galleries. More information can be found at hiltner.english.ucsb.edu(link is external)
ann-elise lewallen’s research focuses on critical indigenous studies, energy policy, gender studies, intersectionality, and environmental justice in the context of contemporary Japan and India. She is also concerned with ethnographic research ethics and issues of knowledge construction in relation to host communities. In her newest book, The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender and Settler Colonialism in Japan (School for Advanced Research Press and University of New Mexico Press, 2016), lewallen analyzes indigenous Ainu women’s use of cultural production as an idiom of resistance against ongoing Japanese settler colonialism and for trans-generational cultural revival initiatives across the Ainu community. In the book, she explores how Ainu women forge identities to demonstrate cultural viability, by tracking their efforts to both produce and preserve material arts as a way of memorializing ancestors and recuperating self-worth. Ainu women’s strategies to reinscribe traditional gender-complementary labor, she argues, enable network-building with indigenous women globally, while challenging feminist discourses favoring gender equity for all women. Her work analyzes how indigenous politics, practices, and identity formation are all profoundly shaped by social constructions of gender. Lewallen’s current research investigates how discourses of science and politics shape development policy and impact indigenous sovereignty in transnational relationships between India and Japan. For her second major book, In Pursuit of Energy Justice: Embodied Solidarity in India and Japan, lewallen is focusing on how indigenous communities in India have sought to incorporate Indigenous knowledge in mapping development projects with Japanese ODA funds. Indigenous communities in India describe such models as rooted in “energy justice” rather than extractive industry, and struggle to incorporate these through solidarity networks with Japan’s civil society.
Julie Maldonado is Associate Director for the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), a link-tank for policy-relevant research toward post-carbon livelihoods and communities. She is co-director of Rising Voices: Climate Resilience through Indigenous and Earth Sciences, works with the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals to support tribes’ climate change adaptation planning, and is a lecturer in University of California-Santa Barbara’s Environmental Studies Program. Dr. Maldonado is also a founding member of the Culture and Disaster Action Network. As a public anthropologist, Julie has consulted for the UN Development Programme and World Bank on resettlement, post-disaster needs assessments, and climate change. She worked for the US Global Change Research Program and is an author on the 3rd and 4th US National Climate Assessments. Her doctorate in anthropology from American University focused on the social and cultural impacts of environmental change and habitual disasters in coastal Louisiana. She was the lead editor for a special issue for the journal Climatic Changeentitled, Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the United States: Impacts, Experiences and Actions,which was published in 2012. Her book, Seeking Justice in an Energy Sacrifice Zone: Standing on Vanishing Land in Coastal Louisiana, and co-edited volume, Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement: Risks, Impoverishment, Legacies, Solutions, were both released in 2018. As part of LiKEN, she organized and is executive producer of the Paper Rocket Productions film, Protect, which will be released in December 2018.
Professor David N. Pellow is the Dehlsen and Department Chair of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he teaches courses on environmental and social justice, race/class/gender and environmental conflict, human-animal conflicts, sustainability, and social change movements that confront our socioenvironmental crises and social inequality. He has volunteered for and served on the Boards of Directors of several community-based, national, and international organizations that are dedicated to improving the living and working environments for people of color, immigrants, indigenous peoples, and working class communities, including the Global Action Research Center, the Center for Urban Transformation, the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health, Global Response, Greenpeace USA, and International Rivers. Pellow’s research has included: 1. Supervising a group of UCSB students in developing a Green New Deal for California's Central Coast region in collaboration with the Central Coast Climate Justice Network; 2. Leading a collaboration between UCSB and the Central Coast Climate Justice Network to advance our knowledge base concerning fossil fuel development projects in the region and to support campaigns that promote energy and climate justice; 3. A study of how environmental privilege and environmental racism shape the local ecology and life chances of native born and immigrant residents of Aspen and Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley; 4. A study of radical environmental and animal rights movements’ goals, successes and failures, and the impact of government repression on these activists who are frequently labeled “eco-terrorists.” 5. A study on conflicts over the disproportionate location of garbage dumps and incinerators in communities of color in Chicago from the 1880s to the 2000s 6. A study of immigrant and working class laborers and environmental justice activists who pushed Silicon Valley companies to become more attentive to demands for sustainability, environmental justice, and occupational safety and health
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am also the founder/director of the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group Lab. My research interests include racism and racialization, waste, materiality, critical environmental politics, labor, linguistic anthropology, nuclear energy, infrastructural inequalities, activism, and humor. Based on over three consecutive years of fieldwork in Bulgaria conducted on city streets, in landfills, Romani neighborhoods, executive offices, and at the Ministry of the Environment, my book manuscript examines the juncture of material waste management and racialization, specifically highlighting how environmental sustainability becomes racial practice. My research has been funded by the School for Advanced Research, Woodrow Wilson Center, Council for European Studies, Fulbright-Hays, American Research Center in Sofia, Wenner-Gren Foundation, U.S. State Department, Hellman Fellows Program, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). As a public anthropologist, Julie has consulted for the UN Development Programme and World Bank on resettlement, post-disaster needs assessments, and climate change. She worked for the US Global Change Research Program and is an author on the 3rd and 4th US National Climate Assessments. Her doctorate in anthropology from American University focused on the social and cultural impacts of environmental change and habitual disasters in coastal Louisiana. She was the lead editor for a special issue for the journal Climatic Changeentitled, Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the United States: Impacts, Experiences and Actions,which was published in 2012. Her book, Seeking Justice in an Energy Sacrifice Zone: Standing on Vanishing Land in Coastal Louisiana, and co-edited volume, Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement: Risks, Impoverishment, Legacies, Solutions, were both released in 2018. As part of LiKEN, she organized and is executive producer of the Paper Rocket Productions film, Protect, which will be released in December 2018.
Richard Widick is a Visiting Scholar at UC Santa Barbara’s Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCSB, where he lectured on theory, culture, media, globalization, social movements and environment before coming to the Orfalea Center. He taught Representations of the Holocaust and courses on Marx, Freud and Nietzsche for the Departments of German and Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature at UCSB. He is the author of Trouble in the Forest: California’s Redwood Timber Wars (2009, University of Minnesota Press) — an ethnography, cultural analysis, and 150 year social history of the colonization and industrialization of California’s northern redwood region by the culture system of modern US capitalism, a history of the so-called 'Indian wars' and labor trouble that set the legal, social and ecological conditions for converging peoples, labor and environmental movements in the present era of globalization. Widick then applied that same framework to the global struggle over emergent global climate governance and the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. During that research, nine years in row (2011 — 2019) Widick represented the University of California as an Official Observer Delegate to the Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COPs), and plans to do so again at the November 2023 UN climate conference in the United Arab Emirates. Inside the UN climate talks, Widick conducts conflict-seeking theoretical, historical, visual and participatory ethnographic filmmaking research that documents the ongoing struggle over emergent global climate governance. In December of 2021 he released a full length documentary on the making of the 2015 Paris Agreement (and the following four years of struggle to implement to complete so-called Paris Rule Book for the implementation of the Agreement). The film, titled The Edmund Pettus Bridge to Climate Justice, can be viewed at The International Institute of Climate Action & Theory (iicat.org).
Alexander is a PhD student in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also participating in the Interdisciplinary PhD Emphasis in Environment and Society, and his research is focused on the intersections of music, sound, and environment. Alexander’s dissertation project engages permaculture landforms as sites of human and more-than-human sonic creativity and collaborative expressivity, with an ear toward the relationship between listening practices and environmental justice work. Alexander also studies the modal traditions of the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, attending specifically to the relationship between musical practices and nation-building projects in these regions. These various research directions are guided by an underlying commitment to understanding how acoustic and musical experiences shape senses of community, belonging, and responsibility within and across social and ecological levels.
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