Although hardly new, our current political climate has brought the specter of American injustice more explicitly into the public eye. The Black Lives Matter Movement, the Flint water crisis, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the various marches on Washington, among others, demonstrate the clear links between humans, nonhuman nature, and justice/equality. Now, then, is a critical moment for the field of environmental studies and sciences to evaluate how we "look outward" at the topics we study and "look inward" at how we conduct our ourselves and our work. Environmental studies and sciences (ESS) purportedly brings a transdisciplinary/multidisciplinary approach to research by linking the arts, humanities, social, and physical sciences in pursuit of more just socioecological outcomes. However, a cursory reflection on the field suggests continued disciplinary divisions that sort the nonhuman and human world into more-or-less distinct and sometimes problematically immutable categories. Further, manuscript discussion sections typically mix in issues of justice and equality ad hoc, rather than explicitly building them into research design and practice. In this article, we argue that feminist theory, and in particular theories of intersectionality, can critique and strengthen the ESS agenda by reforming current practice. Specifically, we draw on intersectionality to reframe how we organize the work we do (looking inward) and how we ask research questions (looking outward). We then use this theoretical framework to suggest how intersectional diversity can inform our future research programs, making the field more poised to meet the complex challenges of global environmental change.
(2012). Feeling the squeeze: a political ecology of race and amenity-based development in coastal Bluffton, South Carolina. Local Environment: Vol. 17, Whither Rio +20?: Demanding a Politics and Practice of Socially Just Sustainability, pp. 991-1011.
This paper points to the importance of studying the intersection of public policy debates, spatial practice, and land use by applying Henri Lefebvre's spatial trialectic in a critique of the ongoing debate over hydraulic fracturing in western Pennsylvania. In this case study, the oil and gas industry appropriates established environmental justice discourses to assert that (1) fracking is clean and environmentally responsible, (2) it will help sustain local families and communities for many generations to come, and (3) fracking locally results in scalar, global benefit. Furthermore, the industry employs ad-hominum attacks and debunking strategies to frame anti-fracking activists as impractical alarmists. Through this rhetorical representation of space, the industry defines the process and associated values of fracking as desirable, inevitable, and most importantly, a sustainable process with just outcomes. Ultimately, the material reality of how the risks and benefits are distributed across the local, national, and global landscape through spatial practice is masked. Focusing exclusively on discourse ignores the real material conditions that give rise to and result from that discourse. Therefore, we argue Lefebvre's (1991) trialectic offers a way to address the interplay between representations and discourses of space and material reality.
En algunos discursos de gestión, los desafíos a la utilización de la ciencia de la salud ambiental en la toma de decisiones sobre los usos del terreno y la formulación de políticas surgen de “desconexiones” entre las herramientas y los descubrimientos de la ciencia de salud ambiental y de las necesidades de los administradores de los usos del terreno. Estas desconexiones han surgido a consecuencia de las epistemologías inconmensurables de científicos y administradores, desembocando en una inevitable falta de interacción entre los grupos que se caracterizan a menudo como incapaces de llevarse bien. Esta investigación toma una visión alternativa en cuanto a desconexiones. Sostenemos que las desconexiones entre la ciencia y la administración de gestión surgen de los a menudo contradictorios movimientos dobles de recursos ambientales y presiones sobre el desarrollo económico dentro de sociedades capitalistas post-capitalistas. Utilizando un marco ecológico político para analizar los conflictos en la gestión ambiental, este trabajo sugiere que las desconexiones pueden estar relacionadas con el problema de la mercantilización de la naturaleza, en lugar de la relación entre científicos y administradores. La teorización de las desconexiones de esta manera abre nuevas oportunidades para pensar acerca de la división ciencia/políticas.
As global urban regions grow and transform, water systems present a unique set of challenges to stakeholders. Municipalities often struggle to pay for and maintain aging infrastructure as well as create equitable access for growing populations—especially in the rapidly urbanizing Global South. Critical approaches to urban water governance have made tremendous contributions to our collective knowledge of how these systems work. In this study, we argue that the most important direction for these approaches to urban water governance is to translate the insights generated by critique into the positive project to construct more just and democratic systems and practices of governance. However, we contend that in order to do this work, critical scholarship on urban water governance will need to continue deepening its engagement with two larger sets of debates. First, to help realize more just and democratic systems, it will need to grapple with the complex dimensions of debates on how to theorize and conceptualize justice and democracy. Second, in order to create effective alternatives to current paradigms of water governance, it will need to show how recent conceptualizations of urban water as hybrid or heterogeneous assemblage can help build truly trans disciplinary collaborations. We explore these debates through a review of recent critical approaches to urban water governance, with attention to ways forward that embrace epistemological pluralism and transdisciplinary collaboration. WIREs Water 2015, 2:85–96. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1066 This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water Governance
