Historic Structural Racism and the Temporal Scales of Environmental Justice Struggles in U.S. Cities

This research project explores the environmental legacy of historic structural racism paying special attention to how urban environmental injustice is bound up in the history of housing inequality. One publication in Environmental Research Letters (co-authored with Dr. Patrick Greiner), explores how HOLC scores impact 2010 and 2015 inhalable particulate matter (PM10) concentrations across 15,232 census tracts, clustered in 196 cities.

I’m currently working on a larger project that explores redlining, interstate-highway placement and contemporary on-road transportation emissions. This work uses a critical environmental justice (CEJ) framework to explore how the production of on-road transportation emissions is connected to the racial project of redlining. This framework calls for greater attention to the spatial and temporal scales that influence the causes and consequences of contemporary environmental injustices. We apply this framework by emphasizing how redlining is connected to subsequent interstate-highway construction, producing spatially fixed infrastructures that continue to generate higher transportation emissions in formerly disinvested areas, regardless of who lives there now. This work demonstrates how structural racism relates to modifications in the built environment to reflect the social and ideological process of racialization. Thus, emissions reductions cannot be addressed by behavioral change approaches alone.

Mutual Aid as Transformative Environmental Justice

This project builds upon recent work in Critical Environmental Justice to explore the phenomenon of mutual aid as a means of both practicing and realizing transformative environmental justice that allows activists to build environmentally resilient communities both within and beyond the state. One manuscript, recently published in Antipode (co-authored with Dr. Patrick Greiner and Dr. David Pellow), draws on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black Radical Tradition, and other critical apporaches to demonstrate how mutual aid offers a meaningful point of conjunction for uniting ideological approaches to environmental justice that are often understood as being at odds with one another. To demonstrate this, we provide an overview of the proliferation and longevity of mutual aid networks in times of disaster, drawing on multiple examples including the 1927 Mississippi Floods, Hurricane Katrina, and the Texas power outages. This theoretical vignette style work demonstrates how the tactics of environmental justice organizations advance collective liberation by serving as longstanding models of non-state engagement, empowerment, and survival. Another publication published in Environmental Jusitce uses the concept of mutual aid to deepen connections between critical disability studies and critical environmental justice. This work draws on theories of eco-ability and ecological disablement to develop a deeper understanding of community based approaches climate justice.

Check out a recent publication in The Conversation (co-authored with Dr. David Pellow) on Stop Cop City and the criminalization of mutual aid practices.

Transportation Justice

My doctoral work links accessibility to cleaner forms of public transit to patterns of gentrification, unaffordable housing, and unequal city development. One substantive paper from my dissertation explores how light rail transit (LRT), a contentious form of transit-oriented development, relates to gentrification and neighborhood change in 6 urban areas that developed LRT between 1986 and 2000. The results reveal that in some areas, the development of LRT is connected to gentrification, increasing housing costs, and the decline of people of color. In most cities transportation ridership has failed to increase in areas surrounding LRT. This study highlights how gentrification surrounding LRT reflects a system of environmental privilege that serves as a source of environmental inequity and transportation inaccessibility for people of color and the poor. My dissertation work builds upon a publication in Environmental Sociology (co-authored with Dr. Lacee Satcher, Dr. Stacey Houston, and Dr. David Hess) that examines the relationship between patterns of intersectional inequality and proximity to dirty diesel bus depots in New York City. Similarly, I have explored the environmental and social equity concerns of ridesourcing. Another publication (co-authored with Dr. David Hess) at Environment and Planning A connects ridesourcing to patterns of unsustainable and uneven development in Chicago. The results reveal that areas with high levels of ridesharing have seen declining communities of color, growing white populations, and rising rents.