environmental policy and planning.”
J. M. Baconis a visiting assistant professor in the Sociology Department at Grinnell College. Bacon’s research explores the relationship between culture, identity, and eco-social practice with special attention to activism, emotions, and decolonization. Current projects include an ongoing consideration of settler solidarity with Indigenous-led environmental activism, an analysis of the experiences of LBGTQ+ environmental activists, and place attachment among Celtic cultural practitioners.
Carolina L. Balazsis a research scientist for the California EPA’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), where she leads the Human Right to Water project. Balazs is also the co-founder and co-lead of the Water Equity Science Shop at the University of California, Berkeley, a cross-institutional collaboration promoting community-based water equity research. Her studies on social disparities in drinking water contamination in California were among the first such studies in the state. Prior to joining OEHHA, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis, and worked as a research scientist with the Community Water Center. She is the recipient of the Switzer Environmental Leadership Fellowship, the UC Chancellor’s Award for Diversity and Community, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She holds doctoral and master's degrees from UC Berkeley in energy and resources, and a bachelor's degree in environmental science from Brown University.
Phil Brownis a University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Health Science at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute and its PFAS Project lab, which has grants from the National Science Foundation to study social policy and activism concerning PFAS, and from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to study children’s immune responses to PFAS and community response to contamination. He directs an NIEHS T-32 training program, Transdisciplinary Training at the Intersection of Environmental Health and Social Science, and heads the Community Outreach and Translation Core of Northeastern’s Children’s Environmental Health Center (Center for Research on Early Childhood Exposure and Development in Puerto Rico/CRECE) and both the Research Translation Core and Community Engagement Core of Northeastern’s Superfund Research Program (Puerto Rico Testsite to Explore Contamination Threats, PROTECT). His books include No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action; Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement; and Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science, and Health Social Movements.
Robert D. Bullardis Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University in Houston. He is often called “the father of environmental justice.” Bullard is the author of 18 books that address environmental racism, urban land use, housing, transportation, sustainability, smart growth, climate justice, and community resilience. His latest books include Race, Place, and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina (2009), Environmental Health and Racial Equity in the United States (2011), and The Wrong Complexion for Protection (2012). In 2008, Newsweek named him one of the “13 Environmental Leaders of the Century.” In 2013, Sierra Club honored him with its John Muir Award; and in 2014, the organization named its new Environmental Justice Award after him. In 2018, the Global Climate Change Summit named Bullard one of 22 Climate Trailblazers. And in 2019, Apolitical named him one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy.
Stella M. Čapekis Elbert L. Fausett Emerita Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hendrix College. She has taught Environmental Sociology, Social Change/Social Movements, The Urban Community, Images of the City, Medical Sociology, Food/Culture/Nature, Sociology of Travel and Tourism, Sociological Theory, and Exploring Nature Writing, as well as sustainability-focused travel seminars in Costa Rica and in the U.S. Southwest. She co-authored Community Versus Commodity: Tenants and the American City and Come Lovely and Soothing Death: The Right to Die Movement in the United States. Her articles focus on environmental justice, tenants’ rights, urban design, environmental health, and social constructions of nature and the self. She also publishes environmentally themed creative nonfiction and enjoys interdisciplinary collaborations focused on social justice.
Alissa Cordneris associate professor and Paul Garrett Fellow at Whitman College, where she teaches sociology and environmental studies courses. Her research focuses on environmental sociology, the sociology of risk and disasters, environmental health and justice, and public engagement in science and policy making. She is the author of Toxic Safety: Flame Retardants, Chemical Controversies, and Environmental Health (2016), which won the 2018 Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology, and the co-author of The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life (2014). She has conducted extensive research on the regulation, research, and activism related to industrial chemicals. She also studies the sociological aspects of wildfire risk management in the Northwest with a focus on firefighter safety, public safety, and resource management.
Cristina Faiver-Sernais a Chicana scholar and a doctoral degree candidate in geography at the University of Oregon. She has a master's degree in public health, and worked for several years as the director of health education and outreach at a nonprofit community health center in Southern California. Her current research project builds on her time spent working alongside promotoras de salud against the everyday oppressions of environmental racism, and critically examines the multiscalar geographical and historical infrastructure that requires their ongoing community care work. Faiver-Serna is an interdisciplinary critical race scholar, whose expertise and research interests in critical environmental racism and injustice, Latina feminist theory and praxis, Latinx geographies, and critical public health studies have developed both within, and outside of, academia.
Jill Lindsey Harrisonis associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on environmental justice, environmental politics, workplace inequalities, and immigration politics. In her research, she identifies the narratives, other interactive dynamics, and broader political economic structures through which people come to define highly inequitable circumstances as reasonable and unproblematic. She also identifies the practices through which other groups push the state to remedy those inequalities. She has done so through research on political conflict over agricultural pesticide poisonings in California, immigration policing in rural Wisconsin, and government agencies’ environmental justice efforts. Her first book, Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice (2011), won book awards from the Rural Sociological Society and the Association of Humanist Sociology. Her second book, From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies, was published in 2019.
Elizabeth Hooveris associate professor of American studies and faculty chair of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative steering committee at Brown University. Her first book, The River Is In Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community (2017), is an exploration of Akwesasne Mohawks’ response to Superfund contamination and environmental health research. She is currently working on her second book, From Garden Warriors to Good Seeds: Indigenizing the Local Food Movement, exploring Native American community–based farming, food and seed sovereignty, Native chefs in the food movement, and the fight against the fossil fuel industry to protect heritage foods. Hoover’s other publications include co-editing Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States with Devon Mihesuah (2019) and several articles. Outside of academia, Hoover serves on the executive committee of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and the board of North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems.
George Lipsitzis professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-author with Barbara Tomlinson of Insubordinate Spaces: Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice. His single-authored books include The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, How Racism Takes Place, A Life in the Struggle, Time Passages, and A Rainbow at Midnight. Lipsitz serves as chair of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum. He was awarded the American Studies Association’s Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship in 2013 and its Bode-Pearson Prize for Career Distinction in 2016.
Deniss Josefina Martinezis a doctoral student in the Graduate Group in Ecology at the University of California, Davis. She is also a health policy research scholar with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her work seeks to understand how California Native Nations navigate power differentials in varying natural resource stewardship collaborations with western institutions. She is passionate about increasing Indigenous representation in environmental stewardship in order to support environmental justice, health equity, sovereignty, and cultural vitality.
Beth Rose Middleton
