UC Berkeley

Critical environmental justice scholars and feminist political ecologists currently call for more meaningful inquiry into the role(s) of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities, women, youth, and queer folk in resisting premature death, precarity, and racial capitalist climate patriarchy. Feminist activist researchers likewise strive to center feminist epistemological and methodological tools (i.e., intersectionality, embodied knowledge, partial perspectives, and an ethic of care) when researching climate change. (We) expose the under-theorization of gender in environmental justice studies and highlight the links between gendered vulnerability to climate change and the androcentricity of extractive economies. Despite these intellectual advancements, women of color (WOC) in the USA continue to be vastly underrepresented in climate policy, coastal adaptation planning, environmental decision-making, and natural resource management.

My dissertation innovatively develops and applies an ecowomanist and (auto)ethnographic methodology to theorize Black and Indigenous women’s everyday resistance to state-corporate crime in Gulf Coast Louisiana. I methodologically employ Black feminist (auto)ethnography, participant observation, conversational and semi-structured interviews, and multi-sited ethnography to investigate how Gulf Coast Black and Indigenous women navigate contradictory relationships with energy and petrochemical industries, resist environmental violence, and imagine a just transition to fossil fuel freeish futures. I likewise interrogate WOC’s situated ecological knowledge, critiques of resiliency and activist frameworks, and pedagogical engagements with youth of color to facilitate decolonial and feminist political conscientization.

I furthermore push back at the positivist aims of environmental science & studies (ESS); extractive methodologies within ESS continue to inflict emotional and bodily harm on communities of color and systematically erase and invalidate the epistemic contributions of WOC to environmental solution-making and climate policy. My findings moreover indicate that Gulf Coast Black, Indigenous, Women of Color (BIWOC) resist petro-hegemony and Louisianan politics of expendability through gendered and racialized acts of refusal, recovery, rejection, rest, restoration, and reimagining (R6). We strategically challenge and (re)frame relationships with polluting industries and resiliency frameworks to enact anti-resilient care ethics and embody gendered understandings of inter- and intragenerational accountability to human and more-than-human kin.

Broader impacts of the work include increasing opportunities for Black and Indigenous women to shape climate policy, amplifying the intellectual genius of WOC advocating for energy and climate reparations, and resisting the devaluation of life in sacrifice zones. My research also highlights contradictions in women’s everyday lives that speak to contradictions in the larger environmental movement and our international dependence on fossil fuels. Feminist activist and ecowomanist methodologies thus hold the power to increase the representation of Gulf Coast women and youth of color in environmental and energy policy, build transnational solidarity around feminist climate justice, and (re)imagine toxic geographies and sacrifice zones as feminist abolition ecologies.