My book Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism (UC Press, 2022) shows how California environmental justice activism institutionalized over the last three decades. Activists increasingly engage in policy advocacy and collaboration with state agencies, and decreasingly engage in disruptive protest. I place these slow shifts in the form of environmental justice activism within the context of broader political trends of the last three decades, including the professionalization of the non-profit sector and the shifting racial politics accompanying the continued growth of the state’s majority people of color population. The book updates our understanding of environmental justice activism and pushes back against a tendency to conceptualize it as monolithic in ways that obscure the internal debates and varied tactics among activists. Case studies on the largest hazardous waste landfill west of the Mississippi (see an excerpt here) and on the implementation of California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 provide up-close examples of the opportunities and limitations that result from activist institutionalization. Ultimately, the book argues that while California is an environmental justice policy leader, the scope of the environmental problems the state’s most disenfranchised still face should also make it a warning.

While the climate change chapter in my book focuses on environmental justice activists’ engagement with California climate policy, other work analyzes transnational activism led by California environmental justice activists and Mexican indigenous peoples in opposition to a plan to link the California carbon market to Mexican forest preservation efforts. Still other work uses the history of environmental justice activism in California to showcase how the national environmental justice movement draws on multiple social movement traditions, including but not limited to the Civil Rights movement.

My earliest work analyzed women’s pathways into environmental justice advocacy in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Much existing research finds that women become environmental justice activists according to a common set of experiences in which apolitical women personally experience an environmental problem that launches them into a life of activism to protect the health of their families. Although a small group of the 25 women I interviewed fit this description, overall my interviews revealed a much more diverse array of paths into environmental justice activism. Most of the women I interviewed already had political experience before becoming environmental justice advocates, and they drew on social justice values to motivate their activism.  This matters because depicting women activists primarily as mothers can reinforce stereotypes about women, even though it may also help their immediate goal of limiting pollution by showing them in a sympathetic light through conforming to traditional gender roles. This research was published in Organization & Environment in the spring of 2012.

This vein of my work draws from many years of teaching students to edit Wikipedia in my undergraduate courses on environmental justice, food and agriculture. One article, co-authored with undergraduate students from Howard University, uses our experience with the assignment to highlight how racism and sexism persist inform the knowledge shared on Wikipedia. Current work expands this analysis to the use of images on Wikipedia.

This work analyzes the political work of imagery. One essay analyzes the larger-than-life cut-out billboard murals depicting farmers and farmworkers in California’s agricultural Salinas Valley. I argue that while the billboards counter the general invisibility of Latinx workers by highlighting their role in producing food for the nation, they also undercut the need for improved working conditions by showing them as happy workers.

During my time as an Assistant Professor at Howard University (2015-2020), I worked with the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, Empower DC, ANC Rhonda Hamilton, graduate student Jesse DiValli and two cohorts of undergraduate students in my Environmental Inequality class to document residents’ experiences of redevelopment near Buzzard Point in Southeast Washington DC. Our first publication was a profile of resident, activist and elected neighborhood leader Rhonda Hamilton in the Anacostia Museum newsletter. We subsequently published an academic article on titled “‘They know they’re not coming back’: resilience through displacement in the riskscape of Southwest Washington, DC.” Some of the our interviews are archived at the DC Public Library. The rest await processing at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum.

I explore a variety of ways to share my work outside of books and journals. Voices from the Valley: Environmental Justice in California’s San Joaquin Valley uses oral history excerpts, photography, and teaching suggestions to paint a vivid picture of environmental injustices as well as the environmental justice activists who tackle them. In Her Own Words: Teresa De Anda, Pesticides Activists (1959-2014) shares an edited oral history of Teresa De Anda’s life and the battles she fought against pesticide drift in her home-town of Earlimart and across California. “Images from the Central Valley” is a photo-essay of Central Valley environmental justice activism. An article in Critical Sustainabilities: Analyzing Competing Discourses of Urban Development in Northern California, analyzes the politics of categorizing as renewable the energy created from waste incinerators through a case in Gonzales, CA. An article in Tales of Hope and Caution in Environmental Justice presents the impact of the United Farm Workers of America on contemporary environmental justice activism in California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley. As noted above, oral history interviews with residents of Southeast Washington DC describe how the area has changed over time. Most recently, the Ward Valley Archive is searchable online collection of the privately held archival materials from the 1990s-era Save Ward Valley campaign in the Mojave Desert led by the Fort Mojave, Chemehuevi, Quechan, Cocopah, and the Colorado River Indian Tribes (known as CRIT) along with a diverse array of other environmentalists .

I also publish reflections on conducting public and digital sociology to share lessons learned with other scholars and aspiring scholars. These include “Stories from the Field: Public Engagement through the Environmental Humanities and Allied Disciplines,” published in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities and “On Becoming a Public Sociologist: Amplifying Women’s Voices in the Quest for Environmental Justice,” published in Sociologists in Action on Inequalities: Race, Class and Gender. The SAGE Academic and Research Skills video collection also includes a video in which I describe lessons learned from the Voices from the Valley project, as well as another in which I give tips on making an academic website.