This session will be streamed, recorded, and archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

Curated Track: 

Description:

This is the second of four sessions focusing on "new" geographies of environmental justice. It will focus on environmental justice analysis tools and methods.

Environmental justice (EJ) as a frame for policy and action is experiencing a resurgence of interest in recent years globally and within the United States. The US federal government and a host of states are revising environmental justice policies with a collective aim to provide benefits to communities rendered disadvantaged by legacies of pollution and underinvestment. Central to many of these efforts are attempts to improve public engagement practices, revise definitions of disadvantage, marginalization, injustice and to develop enhanced mapping tools to better identify environmental justice areas. The Biden Administration’s Justice40 initiative is also linking federal funding to environmental justice by proposing that 40% of federal investments flow to “disadvantaged communities” (White House, n.d). Accompanying shifts in EJ policy landscapes are increased efforts by civil society groups to mobilize to confront legacies of environmental injustice as well as emergent challenges of challenges of energy and climate injustice (Johnson 2019; Rice et al. 2022). Perhaps unique to civil society mobilization are efforts to address perceived gaps in regulation by initiating citizen science efforts to monitor air and water systems in pursuit of justice (Wylie, 2018).

This session will critically examine what, if anything, is new about these initiatives. Critical social scientists have long critiqued attempts to “improve” initiatives via revised participation, definitions, and mapping (Li, 2007). To what extent are these recent EJ efforts offering (or not) new pathways to justice and for whom? Do these efforts create spaces for new actors to engage? How, if at all, are critical social scientific perspectives informing policy and civil society efforts to address EJ? How, if at all, are regulators and civil society organizations coordinating and informing efforts within and across groups?

Non-Presenting Participants