Fall 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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September 24th
Monica White presents: Freedom Farming: Agricultural Resistance and Institution Building
This presentation will provide context for understanding agriculture as a strategy of resilience and resistance for African Americans. It will offer a perspective of the labor and commitment to agriculture from those in southern Black rural communities to those building community-based food systems in urban spaces.
Dr. Monica M. White is the Distinguished Chair of Integrated Environmental Studies (2021-25), associate professor of Environmental Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and past president of the Board of Directors for the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. She is the first Black woman to earn tenure in both the College of Agricultural Life Sciences (established 1889) and the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies (established 1970), to which she is jointly appointed. As the founding director of the Office of Environmental Justice and Engagement (OEJ) at UW-Madison, Dr. White works toward bridging the gap between the university and the broader community by connecting faculty and students to community-based organizations that are working in areas of environmental/food/land justice toward their mutual benefit. She is also an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2022-2024 and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies.
Dr. White’s research investigates Black grassroots organizations that are engaged in the development of sustainable, community-based food systems as a strategy to respond to issues of hunger and food inaccessibility in both contemporary times and the twentieth century. In addition to her scholarship, and in collaboration with the National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), Dr. White serves as the Director of the HBCU Project, to facilitate the development of centers for agroecology at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
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The Carnegie Fellowship she holds represents the recognition that this research puts Dr. White in an exceptional group of established and emerging humanities scholars that are strengthening U.S. democracy, driving technological and cultural creativity, exploring global connections and global ruptures, and improving natural and human environments.
October 8th
Dan O'Brien presents: The Pointillistic City: Well-Being and Equity in Communities and their Places
The Pointillistic City extends the classic observation that “neighborhoods matter” for health and well-being, arguing that we need to pay more attention to the other geographic scales that we live at—including streets within neighborhoods and even properties within streets—and how they each affect us. This is analogous to a pointillistic painting, which is similarly organized into dots within objects and objects within a full image. This “pointillistic perspective” surfaces microspatial inequities, or disparities between people living in the same neighborhood, as a pressing and overlooked concern for our science, policy, and practice. The book illustrates this perspective through two civic research projects: one on the impact of problem properties on public safety; and the other on the pertinence of “urban heat islets” and other hyperlocal hazards to environmental justice. It ends with guidance for designing policies and practices that address microspatial inequities, with an emphasis on putting cutting-edge data in the hands communities.
Dr. Dan O’Brien is Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI). His research focuses on equity in urban neighborhoods, including crime, environmental justice, and more. His three books, The Urban Commons (Harvard University Press; 2018), Urban Informatics (Chapman Hall / CRC Press; 2022), and The Pointillistic City (MIT Press; 2024), demonstrate the value of integrating data-driven science with community-oriented policy and practice.
October 29th
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani presents: The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places
Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In her recent book, The Cities We Need (MIT Press), photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani's evocative images illuminate what's at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.
In this talk exploring her unique book, Bendiner-Viani will make visible how seemingly unimportant places can lay the foundation for a functional interconnected society, so necessary for both public health and social justice. The Cities We Need explores both what we gain in these spaces and how we risk losing both our senses of self and our democracy as they are threatened by gentrification, large-scale development, public health threats, and climate change. Ultimately, Bendiner-Viani shows us how to understand ourselves as part of a shared society, with a shared fate; she shows us that everyday places can be the spaces of liberation in which we can build the cities we need.
Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a writer, artist, and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio on place and dialogue, Buscada. She is the author of The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024) and Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (University of Iowa Press, 2019), a finalist and honoree for the MAS Brendan Gill Award. A widely exhibited photographer, she was a professor of urban studies at the New School for a decade and has been a fellow at both the International Center of Photography in New York and the Centre for Urban Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
November 12th
Marcos Luna presents: Defining environmental justice communities when ‘equity’ is a banned word
Since the emergence of the Environmental Justice movement, maps have been pivotal tools in revealing patterns of environmental and social inequality, in legitimizing what many communities already knew – that power and oppression shape the landscape of opportunity and risk. Mapping remains critical to Environmental Justice activism, research, and policy. Maps are often employed as tools of accountability, and as a result, mapping is both a technical and a political act, facing both technical and political challenges. Within the current political climate, these challenges have been magnified, but they are not new. They are familiar and pernicious obstacles to the larger movement for social justice. And they share a common root – a resistance to naming and confronting the role of racism and other forms of social and political marginalization that sustain the inequitable landscape of privilege and oppression. This is a discussion about how that resistance is manifested, how it challenges the task of mapping in environmental justice research and policy, and reflections on what it means to meaningfully engage with environmental justice mapping as a technical and political act.
Dr. Marcos Luna is a Professor of Geography and Sustainability and Coordinator of the graduate Geo-Information Science program at Salem State University. He has a Ph.D. in Urban Affairs and Public Policy with a concentration in Technology, Environment and Society from the University of Delaware. His research focuses on environmental justice and applications of geospatial analytic techniques to social and environmental inequities. He works with community organizations and policy makers on environmental justice, housing and segregation, transportation equity, and climate change adaptation. He is a governor-appointed member of the Massachusetts Environmental Justice Council. He serves on the Board of Directors for GreenRoots, an environmental justice organization serving Chelsea and East Boston in Massachusetts, as well as the Board of Directors for Comunidades Enraizadas - Community Land Trust in Chelsea, which seeks to create affordable and permanent housing solutions for the lowest income families, especially immigrant families. Finally, he serves on the Education Committee for the Boston Public Library Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center.
November 19th
Charles T. Brown presents: Arrested Mobility
In Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement (Publication Date: May 15, 2025), Charles T. Brown, founder and CEO of Equitable Cities, argues that the legacy of structural racism and White supremacy has led to disinvestment and over-policing in communities of color, thwarting opportunity, as physical mobility and social mobility are intrinsically linked. The experience of policed movement for Black people in the US and around the world is what Brown refers to as arrested mobility.
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A clarion call to change, Arrested Mobility demands action. Brown shares the powerful stories of Black Americans leading the way to un-arrest mobility for Black people, other people of color, and other marginalized groups. He then lays out solutions to un-arrest mobility, including enacting equitable policies, penalizing discriminatory enforcement, investing in Black communities, expanding educational and economic opportunities, and providing mental and physical health resources.
Charles T. Brown is the founder and CEO of Equitable Cities, a minority- and veteran-owned urban planning, public policy, and research firm focused on the intersection of transportation, health, and equity. He is a military veteran, creator and host of the Arrested Mobility podcast and an adjunct professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
December 3rd
Ashanee Kottage presents: Graduate Student Hunger: Just Us Dinners and Food Resources
The Just Us Graduate Student Dinners emerged from a recognition of the quiet crisis of food insecurity and isolation that many graduate students—especially Global Majority, low-income, first-generation, and international students—experience. Academia often disembodies students, extracting them from their cultural food traditions and support networks while offering little institutional concern for whether they are nourished in mind and body. Just Us was conceived with a dual goal: to surface mutual aid networks that already exist among students while also advocating for institutional change to better support graduate student food security. Through shared meals and facilitated conversations, participants will unearth stories of food traditions, articulate their needs, and organize for concrete changes—whether through meal plans, stipends, or alternative food access programs. By partnering with campus affinity centers and guest facilitators who offer their own food stories as an invitation to dialogue, Just Us seeks to be more than just a meal—it is a movement toward re-rooting students in a sense of belonging, collective care, and food justice advocacy within the university.
Ashanee Kottage is a theater maker, poet, and scholar from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the founder of Kavaya Press—an artist collective and sustainable publishing home for writers of the Global Majority responding to their environments.
Her debut poetry collection Sand & Sweat traces a coming-of-age across continents, while her academic scholarship explores the journey of coming-of-place. With a degree from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a Master’s in progress at Tufts in Sustainability, Ashanee approaches community gatherings and art making as both city-scale advocacy and national diplomacy. She is currently based between Boston and Colombo, working on her first film, Lunu Rekha, a meditation on tourism's impact on the south coast of Sri Lanka.