The Work That Reconnects is a composition of theories and embodied practices designed to support ecological and social healing through in-person and online workshops, retreats, and events. Joanna Macy and her colleagues created the Work That Reconnects in the 1970s in response to increasing concerns about nuclear war. Since its inception, the Work That Reconnects teachings and practices continue to evolve to help people worldwide address the current injustices of our time. The purpose of this study is to analyze the potential of the Work That Reconnects as a valuable resource for embodied environmental justice, defined as an anti-oppression approach to restoring a balanced relationship with ourselves, our community, and the Earth through connection of the mind, body, and spirit to the more-than-human realm. Centered around social and ecological justice and healing, this study on the Work That Reconnects also contributes to the growing research on an anti-oppression approach to support people through planetary crisis. Eleven interviews were conducted online with people connected to the Work That Reconnects to understand how it impacts their lives and engagement in embodied environmental and social justice. These interviews helped answer the following questions: What attracts people to the Work That Reconnects? What contributes to feeling connected to the Work That Reconnects?, What contributes to feeling disconnected to the Work That Reconnects?, How can the Work That Reconnects be helpful for Embodied Environmental Justice?, and How can the Work That Reconnects be more inclusive?. Findings confirm that Work That Reconnects is a transformative tool for restoring balance with self and Earth. However, it still lacks the centering of social justice to support healing at the community level. Recommendations include increased skillful facilitation and deeper commitments to anti-oppression, restorative justice, and amplification of people of the global majority in WTR.

This study is a testimonio centered project, which honors the voices of five formerly incarcerated people who are currently employed at MILPA (Motivating Individual Leadership for Public Advancement), an organization that originated in the city of Salinas and has expanded to Watsonville, California. Challenging the way mainstream research devalues emotion and spirit, this thesis incorporates an indigenous ceremonial informed methodology that is relationship centered. Testimonio and the voices of the participants are the central pathways of knowledge for this study. The vision is to expose the realities of the dehumanizing conditions of punitive youth facilities and adult prisons and their interconnected pipeline with early educational experiences. Through the testimonios, I demonstrate how national and local policies funnel young people through the public education system into the prison industrial complex. Through an examination of legislation and policies and doing statewide juvenile justice work, we see that the state is not a homogenous entity. What is also unveiled is that there are state actors and federal policies that have caused detrimental harm to black, indigenous, and other people of color communities in a cyclical form. MILPA, which uses healing informed, relationship-centered approaches to formerly and system impacted individuals while striving for racial justice to end mass incarceration, offers practical ways to break the recidivism rates, and reconstruct bodies that carry intergenerational trauma yet also hold the inflicted politically economic violence of being formerly incarcerated people of color. This thesis contributes to existing prison literature, such as Gilmore (2007), that aims to humanize and expose the extreme conditions and rapid growth of prisons that are tied to larger historical, political, economic power structures. This research reimagines what prisons would look like with more community-based interventions to radically change the culture of prisons and move towards ending mass incarceration.

Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in New Orleans have long endured strenuous hardships through Hurricane Katrina, illegal toxic landfill dumping, the BP oil spill, and many other environmental injustices. Outside media and academics have often portrayed this community as resilient in successfully rebuilding after hurricanes. However, this label can be harmful by overlooking the community’s daily experiences, vulnerabilities, worries, and continued government negligence. This raises the question: In what ways and to what extent does understanding how the Vietnamese community in New Orleans negotiates resilience inform a deep examination of how refugee and immigrant communities navigate injustices and inequities within and beyond the contexts of climate change?To understand the nexus of climate justice and resilience, I re-ground the meaning of resilience through a deep dive into examining refugee resilience. My use and application of refugee resilience contribute to the ongoing discourse that introduces a critical lens into how refugee and immigrant communities such as Vietnamese refugees engage in resilience and climate justice. Specifically contextualized within the Vietnamese refugee community in New Orleans, refugee resilience necessitates the acknowledgment of the strength and capacity of the community to adapt to significant disruptions while critically recognizing the challenges, vulnerabilities, and inequities that they continue to face in the context of climate change. It builds upon the theory by addressing the structural disinvestment by governmental institutions that creates a false hope of supporting the community at the surface level through small grants but neglecting to address the systemic issues that are at the root of the problem. Refugee resilience is examined through three themes that highlight the ways in which this community has been resilient: (1) social memory, (2) the role of community organizations, institutions, and local leadership, and (3) intergenerational perspectives, trauma, and care. Each of these three themes builds upon each other, as social memory informs the analysis of the ways in which organizations, institutions, and leaders engage with previous navigation of disruptions, which allows a deep understanding of intergenerational perspectives and trauma. Social memory emphasizes the importance of navigating past disturbances of war and hurricanes within the Vietnamese refugee diasporic community. The role that community organizations, institutions, and local leaders play is key in empowering and galvanizing community members to advocate for themselves while preserving a solid sense of collaboration. Lastly, listening to community members’ perspectives and relationships with trauma provides a critical analysis of the challenges that the community continues to face amidst their successful attempts to rebuild and preserve their community from disruptions. These three themes are part of a non-linear approach where each of the themes accumulates an understanding of the other themes. This research builds upon Simi Kang’s critique of resilience through a refugee resilience framework that cautions mainstream utilization of resilience but that further requires a critical analysis of how it is used and implicated for specific communities.

This masters thesis project in collaboration with the Feminist Research Institute (FRI) at UC Davis centers their Environmental Justice Leaders Program (EJLP). The mission of the EJLP is to facilitate collaboration between community-based Environmental Justice (EJ) Leaders and UC Davis researchers to benefit both parties’ work in the realms of transportation and energy justice. In the program’s third cycle, this collaboration has taken the form of eight community-university partnerships across six EJ Leaders and seven UC Davis research partners.

Through program design, implementation, and formative, developmental evaluation, this project has collected data to answer the question of how the EJLP can best go about building these partnerships to match the long-term needs of the EJ Leader participants. Data was captured over the course of the beginning few months of this nine month program through usability observations, a mid-program survey, and semi-structured interviews with UC Davis research partners engaged with EJ Leaders.

Findings suggest that the EJLP is successfully launching these eight partnerships to the benefit of EJ Leaders and their community-based efforts for environmental justice across California. This has been accomplished through an iterative, reflexive, multi-stage approach that leverages theoretical perspectives from feminist science and technology studies, critical environmental justice studies, ontological design and design for transitions studies, and community-based participatory research (CBPR). However, data did not suggest that the program’s structure resulted in any change in what participants prioritize when engaging in community-university partnerships. This project also considered the challenges and opportunities of operating the EJLP.

Overall, participants surveyed and interviewed through the course of this research indicated that both the program’s structure and the existence of the EJLP are of value to them. Evaluation data suggests the EJLP could benefit from making more explicit the expectations of all participants, defining key terms that are being utilized, and by integrating more co-creative processes. Recommendations from this study of the EJLP are oriented towards this program as well as how others like it can go about building community-university relationships that better center the long-term needs of community leaders and their organizations.

Disparities in the distribution of transportation system benefits and burdens are significant and have persisted despite the efforts of many to reduce or eliminate them. Although transportation plans and projects must be assessed for their distributive effects in accordance with U.S. laws and regulatory guidance, these analyses rarely uncover findings that result in changes to decisions already made or the creation of entirely new projects or policies. This outcome is due in part to limitations associated with transportation governance institutions including metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), specifically those related to inequitable access to political power and representation. It is also due to methodological choices and limitations in the quantitative analyses that are conducted to understand (and ideally avoid or mitigate) impacts.

This policy brief summarizes findings from the white paper that assesses academic research and transportation planning practice to provide a shared understanding of the definitions, challenges, and opportunities in this field, thereby enabling often-conflicting parties to collaborate in achieving a common goal: transportation equity.

View the NCST Project Webpage