Environmental Justice
HaSS Cornwall supports an understanding of environmental change over time that puts justice for people, organisms, and eco-systems at its centre.
The research cluster seeks to work with a broad range of partners to investigate and share potential solutions to environmental injustices at multiple, often intersecting, levels (global, national, and local) in a variety of contexts. We are also future focused, seeking to pre-empt and prevent environmental injustices emerging from new infrastructural or environmental projects, and emerging genetic, agricultural, and digital technologies. Corporations and universities have an important role to play in the so-called fourth industrial revolution which, without careful foresight, may entrench existing environmental injustices and generate new ones in its quest for Net Zero.
We will do this work through developing and using co-creative methodologies, transdisciplinary insights, and civic partnerships. A key vehicle for this work is our Environmental Justice Café, held monthly, that will engage a range of partners and invite creative practices. These Cafés will allow us to hear from and share knowledges with academic speakers, as well as from those who are experiencing or facing environmental injustice.
Who participated in the big one?
A profile of participants in Extinction Rebellion's April 2023 actions
HaSS Cornwall working paper | No. 1 | April 2024
Extractivist and environmentally polluting models of capitalism have generated deep injustices that have had devastating effects on indigenous peoples, the economically marginalised, local communities, the environment, and non-human species. Power structures (the state, corporations, colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity etc.) continue to generate and entrench environmental injustices. Environmental injustices are prominently recognised in dramatic conflicts such as the Ogoni peoples’ struggles against oil companies’ operations in Nigeria, and Native Americans’ non-violent resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in the US. But they also take place in more local and less visible contexts, such as unequal access to “nature”; or being more affected by environmental degradation and climate change due to poverty. Environmental injustice also takes place in relation to non-humans. For example, environments with large rabbit populations become degraded, and selectively bred ornamental flowers can do injustice to native invertebrate species.
- What are the different types of environmental injustice that exist? How useful are creative methodologies that combine different ways of “knowing” for mapping and thinking through environmental injustice? And in which ways can a broad focus on environmental injustices contribute to environmental justice scholarship?
- How can different ways of “knowing” contribute to the study of injustices in relation to nonhumans, and what are the power relations among these ways of knowing?
- What have been the affordances of different attempts to resolve environmental injustices? What can we learn from this to inform our own pro-active approach to learning, with communities, ways of pre-empting, preventing, and redressing environmental injustices?
- What are the environmental injustices facing communities in Cornwall? How can knowledge and experiences be shared across local communities and beyond to generate a civic and useful form of scholarship on the environment and justice?
- How can we ensure that potential environmental injustices are recognised and prevented in University and industry-led environmental and infrastructural projects?
Cluster Leads: Clare Saunders (Politics), Tiago de Melo Cartaxo (Law), Swastee Ranjan (Law)
Cluster Members: Misan Afinotan, Ella Rolfe, Tom Baycock, Steffen Boehm, Molly Bond, Faruk Divarci, Rebecca Edgerley, Stephanie Hirtenstein, Fay Kahane, Deborah McFarlane, James McQuilken (from Pact), David Monciardini, Bryony Onciul, Natalie Pollard, Lívia Regina Batista, Karen Scott, Rob Smith, Nicola Whyte
Linked networks & centres
