My research explores environmental and climate justice using critical race and feminist political ecology lenses. Broadly speaking, I am interested in race, place, gender, justice and nature. My past research projects investigate urban greenspace management, food justice/ethnobotany and coastal resource management; they also interrogate environmental racism(s), sustainability and ecojustice. My auto-ethnographic doctoral work titled “Post-Apocalyptic Environmental Politics: Women of Color, Climate Justice and State-Corporate Crime in Louisiana” investigates how Gulf Coast Black and Indigenous women navigate contradictory relationships with energy and petrochemical industries, resist environmental racism, and advocate for energy, food and climate solutions.
My current project troubles the narrative conventions of positivist research to instead value knowledge of the body and what Lindsey Adams describes as Black feminism’s minor empiricism. I center what Donna Haraway terms “situated knowledges” and “feminist objectivity” while creatively using self-reflexivity to push back at objective science and ongoing scientific and epistemic imperialism. I write for multiple audiences, employ multi-vocality as a scholar-activist and embrace the lived, embodied and sensual reality of “outsider, within” ethnography. I also explore multi-layered textuality through the bricolage of text, dialogue, humor, poetry, songs, proverbs, folklore, photography and other types of digital media in my ethnographic narrative.
I have conducted over two years’ worth of participant observation with various community-based organizations and will conduct in-depth ecowomanist oral histories (2-5 hours each) with over 50 women of color in Gulf Coast Louisiana by the completion of my research. I employ archives, feminist media analysis, community conversations (focus groups), surveys, conversational-style interviews and participatory mapping in my past and present work. My scholarship will ultimately help democratize environmental governance, diversify leadership within environmental policy and planning, and innovate feminist mixed methods in environmental sociology, geography and feminist anthropology.
My current project troubles the narrative conventions of positivist research to instead value knowledge of the body and what Lindsey Adams describes as Black feminism’s minor empiricism. I center what Donna Haraway terms “situated knowledges” and “feminist objectivity” while creatively using self-reflexivity to push back at objective science and ongoing scientific and epistemic imperialism. I write for multiple audiences, employ multi-vocality as a scholar-activist and embrace the lived, embodied and sensual reality of “outsider, within” ethnography. I also explore multi-layered textuality through the bricolage of text, dialogue, humor, poetry, songs, proverbs, folklore, photography and other types of digital media in my ethnographic narrative.
I have conducted over two years’ worth of participant observation with various community-based organizations and will conduct in-depth ecowomanist oral histories (2-5 hours each) with over 50 women of color in Gulf Coast Louisiana by the completion of my research. I employ archives, feminist media analysis, community conversations (focus groups), surveys, conversational-style interviews and participatory mapping in my past and present work. My scholarship will ultimately help democratize environmental governance, diversify leadership within environmental policy and planning, and innovate feminist mixed methods in environmental sociology, geography and feminist anthropology.
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