Filtering by
- All Subjects: environmental justice
- Genre: Academic theses
- Genre: Masters Thesis
- Creators: Adamson, Joni
- Creators: Harlan, Sharon L
In particular, I discuss one of the concepts that have caught the attention of those studying race and ethnicity in the Americas: mestizaje as an ordinal principle in the context of Mexico. Also, I discuss the inscriptions of the mestiza body in relation to the materiality of race and gender in the context of Latin America. It is shown how the discourse of mestizaje is tangled with the idea of a modern civilization, such as in the Mexican state. Overall, this research analyzes different responses to environmental crises; from environmental activists, community organizers to plastic artists and scientific experts. Also, it includes a literary analysis of contemporary indigenous literatures to show how state sponsored violence and settler colonialism have an incidence in gender violence by placing the female body close to nature.
As global environmental problems have risen, this research contributes to the understanding of the underlying factors in environmental crises and conflict that have been overlooked. Herein lies an important possibility to reach a broader audience in different disciplines, ranging from indigenous studies to the global politics of human rights. Furthermore, this research aims to contribute to the work of environmental activists, scholars and scientists with regard to the understanding of how different arguments are used in research and advocacy work, and how they can integrate an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach when addressing environmental justice cases.
In Environmental Justice Witnessing, I expand arguments made by environmental scholars about the exchange of environmental elements among humans, animals, and landscapes to include the way poets reflect this transfer poetically. The poetry of Ridge, Rukeyser, Brooks, and Bishop allows me to investigate the ways the categories of race, gender, and class, typically thought of as human qualities, are integrally tied to the geographic, national, and cultural bounds in which those categories are formulated. This argument has clear implications on the study of poetry and its environmental contexts as it invites discussions of the transnational conceptions of global citizenship, examinations of the relationships among communities, the environment, and overarching power structures, and arguments surrounding the ways that poetry as art can bring about long-term social and environmental awareness.
Environmental hazards and disaster researchers have demonstrated strong associations between sociodemographic indicators, such as age and socio-economic status (SES), and hazard exposures and health outcomes for individuals and in certain communities. At the same time, behavioral health and risk communications research has examined how individual psychology influences adaptive strategies and behaviors in the face of hazards. However, at present, we do not understand the explanatory mechanisms that explain relationships between larger scale social structure, individual psychology, and specific behaviors that may attenuate or amplify risk. Extreme heat presents growing risks in a rapidly warming and urbanizing world. This dissertation examines the social and behavioral mechanisms that may explain inequitable health outcomes from exposure to concurrent extreme heat and electrical power failure in Phoenix, AZ and extreme heat in Detroit, MI. Exploratory analysis of 163 surveys in Phoenix, AZ showed that age, gender, and respondent’s racialized group identity did not relate to thermal discomfort and self-reported heat illness, which were only predicted by SES (StdB = -0.52, p < 0.01). Of the explanatory mechanisms tested in the study, only relative air conditioning intensity and thermal discomfort explained self-reported heat illness. Thermal discomfort was tested as both a mechanism and outcome measure. Content analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews in Phoenix, AZ revealed that social vulnerability was associated with an increase in perceived hazard severity (StdB = 0.44, p < 0.01), a decrease in perceived adaptation efficacy (StdB = -0.38, p = 0.02), and an indirect increase (through adaptive efficacy) in maladaptive intentions (StdB = 0.18, p = 0.01). Structural equation modeling of 244 surveys in Phoenix, AZ and Detroit, MI revealed that relationships between previous heat illness experience, perceived heat risk, and adaptive intentions were significantly moderated by adaptive capacity: high adaptive capacity households were more likely to undertake adaptive behaviors, and those decisions were more heavily influenced by risk perceptions and previous experiences. However, high adaptive capacity households had lower risk perceptions and fewer heat illness experiences than low adaptive capacity households. A better understanding of the mechanisms that produce social vulnerability can facilitate more salient risk messaging and more targeted public health interventions. For example, public health risk messaging that provides information on the efficacy of specific adaptations may be more likely to motivate self-protective action, and ultimately protect populations.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.