Environmental Justice 2.0

AAG 2019: Critical Environmental Justice (EJ 2.0)

This session is jointly sponsored by the Energy and Environment Specialty Group (EESG) and the Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) Specialty Group.

Critical environmental justice, or EJ 2.0, expands on “first generation” EJ scholarship by explicitly taking an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and multi-scalar approach to examining and alleviating disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, in a way that deepens the practice of direct democracy (Carter 2016; Pulido 2017; Pellow, 2016). Pellow (2016:223) suggests that scholars should investigate questions of intersectionality (in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.); more readily undertake multi-scalar analyses of the “causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of EJ struggles”; examine the degree to which inequality and power relations, including state power, are perceived as being entrenched; and better account for the ways in which human and non-human populations experiencing violence are deemed “expendable”. In this session, we seek papers that draw on critical race, feminist, anti/post-colonial, queer theory and beyond to engage with EJ 2.0 conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary, critical EJ praxis that incorporates critical physical geography, radical citizen science, community-based engineering, informal STEM, and other approaches. We see this session as an opportunity to focus on the content of critical EJ, as well as to refine our methods and analytical approaches to critical EJ research.

**This session will be organized in collaboration with Dean Hardy and Ellen Kohl’s session to be advertised separately.

Carter, E. D. (2016). Environmental justice 2.0: new Latino environmentalism in Los Angeles. Local Environment, 21(1), 3-23.

Pellow, D. N. (2016). What is critical environmental justice?. John Wiley & Sons.

Pulido, L. (2017). Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 524-533.