Spring 2025
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All colloquia are held via Zoom webinar from 12:00-1:00 pm ET
Recordings will be made available after the presentation
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January 22nd
Prakash Kashwan presents Political-Economic Inequalities, Policy Narratives, and Pathways to Justice
Most researchers of environmental and climate justice agree that political and economic inequalities hurt the environment, racial minorities, Indigenous Peoples, and other marginalized communities. Yet, these conclusions are based, almost exclusively, on analyses of the distribution of "environmental bads" (e.g., industrial pollution and toxic waste).
Drawing on a longstanding and cumulative multi-methods research program focused on the distribution of "environmental goods" (biodiversity conservation), this talk offers an alternative analysis of the relationship between environment and inequality with normative implications that are more complex than those implied in the environmental justice literature.
Such ambiguous normative implications test the ability of societies to prioritize climate justice over climate action with dubious social impacts. In conclusion, we engage in collective reflections on the prospects of developing politically-resilient strategies for promoting environmental and climate justice.
Prakash Kashwan is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Brandeis University. He is also the Chair of the Environmental Justice concentration in the Master of Public Policy (MPP) program at the Heller School of Social Policy and Management.
His teaching, research, and scholarship focus on the intersections of environment, development, and socioeconomic and political dimensions of global environmental and climate change. Kashwan’s academic engagements build on this interdisciplinary background, including a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), a Master’s in Forestry Management), and a Ph. D. in Public Policy awarded under the tutelage of late Professor Elinor Ostrom, a political economist, who was the joint winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. Equally important, Kashwan’s research and writings are shaped profoundly by his over two decades-long engagements with global and international environmental governance, including a pre-academia career in international development (1999-2005).
He is the author of Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (Oxford University Press 2017), which has been reviewed extensively in scholarly journals and popular media. He is the Editor of Climate Justice in India (Cambridge University Press 2022), one of the Editors of the journal Environmental Politics (Taylor & Francis), and co-founder of Climate Justice Network (with Professor Lauren MacLean of Indiana University, Bloomington ). His next book project (on an advanced contract with Oxford University Press), develops a theory of governing for justice and to illustrate these arguments in the context of efforts to realize socially just climate action in the United States.
January 29th
Maliha Safri presents Solidarity Cities: Examining Solidarity Economies at the Urban level
Contemporary urban discourse is caught in a binary between the Gentrified City, and the Disinvested City. Maliha Safri’s new book presents an alternative urban imaginary: the Solidarity City. Her new co-authored book Solidarity Cities. Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation introduces an alternative spatial imaginary highlighting solidarity relations as definitional features of urban life. In contrast to profit-motive and competition, solidarity economies and the corresponding international movement have commitments to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion. The movement is exceptionally diverse, bringing together community gardens, worker cooperatives, credit unions, all kinds of consumer cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and other organizations. The book makes visible through mapping solidarity economies in three cities - New York City, Philadelphia, and Worcester, MA and analyzes its impact on urban space through spatial analysis, qualitative research, interviews, and economic impact modeling.
Maliha Safri is Professor of economics at Drew University. Her academic research has focused on collective economic practices (including worker, food, and housing cooperatives, amidst other organizations). By teaching popular education seminars and courses with activists since 2000, and specifically with migrant workers at a variety of worker centers in the process of forming collectives, her research was based in concrete issues faced by participants of what some movement activists call solidarity economies, which are economies prioritizing cooperation and inclusion. She has published articles in Signs, Antipode, Environmental Policy and Governance, the Economist's Voice, Organization, among other journals and edited book collections. She has a new co-authored book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism and Mapping Transformation (January 2025, University of Minnesota Press).
February 19th
Duncan McLaren presents From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice
Climate policy increasingly relies on techniques to remove CO2 from the environment as a supplement to cutting emissions: counter-balancing residual emissions in ‘net-zero’ and reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to safer levels. In this talk, Duncan will survey how cities are engaging with carbon removal – reviewing the realistic scope of possibilities such as carbon negative building materials, and carbon removal through urban waste management; and suggest ways in which urban carbon removal could be governed to contribute to goals of justice and sustainability.
Duncan McLaren is currently a Research Fellow with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. His research examines the politics and implications for justice of novel technologies, particularly using public engagement methods. Prior to his PhD studies, completed in 2017, Duncan worked as an environmental researcher and campaigner, most recently as Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland from 2003 to 2011. He has advised and consulted for research and financial institutions, government departments, philanthropic donors and non-governmental bodies on energy, climate, urban and sustainable development issues. Duncan can be found on Bluesky @duncanmclaren.bsky.social, and at www.duncanmclaren.net.
March 12th
Hessann Farooqi presents Local Leadership for Climate Change
This talk explores how and why city governments can step up to lead on climate action, as well as how resident organizing is critical in making this happen. This talk also explores how to build and sustain the political coalition to ensure climate justice policies can be passed and implemented.
Hessann Farooqi is the Executive Director of the Boston Climate Action Network. He is the youngest person and the first person of color appointed to lead BCAN. Hessann studied economics at Boston University, worked in the United States Senate under Sen. Ed Markey, and served on various federal, state, and local political campaigns. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu also appointed him to oversee the implementation of Boston’s key climate law on the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO) Review Board. Hessann is Co-Coordinator of the Boston Green New Deal Coalition and serves as an Environmental Justice Advisor to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council on developing their Greater Boston Climate Action Plan. Hessann previously served as an advisor to The White House and Department of Energy’s Opportunity Project.
April 2nd
Ingrid Waldron presents A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada
Canada was founded on enslavement and dispossession, most exemplified by its assimilationist ideologies and policies, the displacement, subjugation and oppression of Indigenous and Black peoples and cultures, and the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The colonial theft of land and the accumulation of capital have been foundational to Canada’s wealth. In this presentation, Dr. Ingrid Waldron uses settler colonial theory to examine environmental racism in Canada to highlight the symbolic and material ways in which the geographies of Indigenous and Black peoples have been characterized by erasure, domination, dehumanization, destruction, dispossession, exploitation, and genocide. She offers a historical overview of cases of environmental racism in Canada and outlines how she has been addressing environmental racism over the last 10 years in partnership with Indigenous and Black communities, and their allies.
Dr. Ingrid Waldron is Professor and HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. Her research focuses on environmental and climate justice in Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, mental illness and dementia in Black communities, and COVID-19 in Black and South Asian communities. Ingrid is the author of the book There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page, and Ian Daniel. She is the founder and Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project (The ENRICH Project) and helped develop the federal private members bill a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice (Bill C-226). Bill C-226 was approved at Senate on June 13, 2024, and given royal assent on June 20, 2024, becoming the first environmental justice law in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s book entitled From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: The Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities, was published on November 25, 2024. It traces experiences of racial trauma in Black communities in Canada, the US and the UK from the colonial era to the present.
April 16th
Megan Saltzman presents Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona
Megan Saltzman will present her new book--Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona--which explores how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, walking, etc.) challenge the increase of top-down control in the global city. Public Everyday Space focuses on post-Olympic Barcelona—a time of unprecedented levels of gentrification, branding, mass tourism, and immigration. Drawing from examples observed in public spaces (streets, plazas, sidewalks, and empty lots), as well as in cultural representation (film, photography, literature), this book exposes the quiet agency of those excluded from urban decision-making but who nonetheless find ways to carve out spatial autonomy for themselves. Absent from the map or postcard, the quicksilver spatial phenomena documented in this book can make us rethink our definitions of culture, politics, inclusion, legality, architecture, urban planning, and public space.
Megan Saltzman (PhD, University of Michigan) is a teaching professor at Mount Holyoke College in the department of Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx Studies, where she also contributes to the Five Colleges of Massachusetts Architectural Studies Program. Her research focuses on contemporary urban culture of Spanish cities with a transnational and ethnographic approach. Her 2024 book, Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona combines literary and visual arts with fieldwork to expose how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, street selling) not only challenge the city’s policed image but also serve to carve out autonomy from below. Megan has published on urban cultural themes in Spain related to gentrification, spatial in/exclusion, immigration, nostalgia, recycling, urban furniture design, grassroots cultural centers and “artivism.” Most recently Megan has been teaching courses that revolve around three themes: (1) urban studies, (2) material and non-human culture, and (3) ethnically hybrid identities. Besides teaching at Mount Holyoke, Megan has enjoyed teaching at a variety of colleges, including the University of Otago (New Zealand), Grinnell College, the University of Michigan, Amherst College, West Chester University, and this coming fall at Sophia University in Tokyo.