CEGU

Source: https://cegu.uchicago.edu/research/environmental-justice-project/ Parent: https://cegu.uchicago.edu/research/

Platforms Faculty Research Doctoral Research Undergraduate Research

Environmental Justice Project (EJP)

Starting in academic year 25-26, the Environmental Justice Project (EJP) in the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization will convene a set of public programs and events, student initiatives, and a new college-wide BA thesis prize in Environmental Justice. The standing CEGU annual conference, Redekop keynote speakers, and Frizzell Series will all be framed around environmental justice in 25-26.

Environmental Justice Background

Environmental justice emerged in the U.S. as a hybrid field of theory and practice during the 1970s and 1980’s fed by simmering concerns about the siting of hazardous material handling facilities in or near working-class and especially communities of color. From the outset, the environmental justice movement occupied the intersection of existing and emergent social movements of the day: civil rights, Native American indigenous rights, labor and especially farm worker rights, anti-toxic and anti-mining campaigns were among the most notable tributaries. Some of the earliest published work exploring the effects of solid waste incineration appeared in the early 1980s but the United Church of Christ’s report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, published in 1987, was the first national-level study showing race as the strongest predictor of hazardous waste facility siting. Although the toxic waste project was funded and conducted outside the academy, it is considered a founding document in the field of environmental justice scholarship that irrevocably linked the study of environmental harms and hazards with the study of race and marginalized communities more generally.

To be sure, the animating concerns of environmental justice theory and in practice were hardly limited to the United States. Capitalist globalization widened and deepened the extent and impact of myriad ecological (and economic) distribution conflicts in the global north—anti-nuclear and anti-toxic struggles in France, Germany, Spain and Italy in the 1970s and 1980s focused class rather than race—but historically throughout the global south. In the global south particularly, concerns about ecological harm also were often rooted in collateral justice movements such as indigenous community resource claims and opposition to corporate neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism and the multi-lateral development organizations that were their midwives. Beyond, the concept of planetary justice has emerged as a framework to examine deep injustices beyond the human, tracing flows of resources with consideration of planetary boundaries. The scholarly field of political ecology arose in this rich soil as the interdisciplinary study of complex relationships between politics, society, and the environment, with a particular focus on understanding how power dynamics and social inequalities shape and are shaped by environmental change. A central premise of the field is that an understanding of the environment—and nature-society relations writ large—requires consideration not only of the political and economic structures and institutions within which it is embedded, but the forms of knowledge through which the environment is apprehended, experienced, and represented.

Environmental Justice Scholarship Today

From published scholarly discourse to pedagogical advances to faculty cluster hires at prominent institutions of higher education, environmental justice is well recognized and established as a scholarly field. Its holistic approach permeates pedagogical frameworks in traditional disciplines like geography, law, political science, public policy, sociology, ethics, religious studies, and more interdisciplinary fields including environmental studies, gender studies, human rights, urban studies, and urban planning. Increasingly, environmental justice, particularly at the community level is considered in ecological and biological frameworks for biodiversity and geophysical approaches to air, water and climate science. Although Chicago has been a major site of environmental injustices and associated activism, it was not a major academic focus at the University of Chicago until fairly recently through faculty research and student initiatives. The Environmental Justice Project (EJP) and the 2026 CEGU annual conference “Environmental (In)Justice,” convenes an open and multidisciplinary conversation examining the history, the present, and future paths of environmental justice across the globe..

The EJP is a collaborative, convening unit for critical research, pedagogy and community engagement dedicated to understanding and contesting the systemic relations between environmental conditions, social inequality and geo-political forces. The EJP considers the historical and contemporary sources of environmental injustices including the development of energy systems, land transformation through industrialization and modernization, and contemporary frameworks for climate resilience and sustainability. The unit examines the systematic persistence and proliferation of environmental injustices and uneven distribution of climate impacts at local neighborhood levels caused by exposures to contaminants and heightened risks to the impacts of extreme climate events driven by built environment and historic policy induced inequities. The unit also examines the global implications of increasing transnational flows of capital and resources in the name of clean energy transitions and climate resilience. With the establishment of the EJP, CEGU draws on the wide ranging expertise at the University of Chicago and deep environmental engagement of community members and organizations in a collaborative and collective space for environmental justice research, pedagogy and practice. The EJP seeks to advance scholarship and practice dedicated to the creation of innovative and holistic solutions to environmental challenges with the goal of forging more equitable, livable and hopeful planetary futures.

Selected CEGU Undergraduate Courses on Environmental Justice

CEGU 20151—Pacific Worlds: Race, Gender, Health, and the Environment

This discussion-based course will introduce students to both classical and recent scholarship in Pacific World historiography. By adopting micro-historical, comparative, and transnational methods, students will examine the formation of three overlapping “worlds”: The Antipodes, Polynesia, and the northeastern Pacific. Analyzing the myriad intersections of race, gender, health, and the environment, we will explore a range of large-scale historical processes that shaped and reshaped the Pacific between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. These processes include European exploration, settler colonialism, and indigenous sovereignty; sex, depopulation, and race science; labor, migration, and urbanization; industrialization and environmental exploitation; and imperial expansion and citizenship. The course is intended for students with an interest in the Pacific Islands, Australasia, and the North American West, as well as those interested in race, gender, health, or the environment within indigenous, immigrant, or settler colonial contexts. Required readings – which will consist of book chapters and academic articles – will be used to contextualize and critically analyze a variety of primary sources during each class session.

CEGU 20700—Global Health, Environment, and Indigenous Futures

The global coronavirus pandemic has made evident the significance of ecological (im)balances for the well-being of societies. The relationship between structural inequalities, changing environments and health, especially for historically and socio-economically marginalized communities, is now well established. At the same time, a growing body of literature links the material conditions of marginalized communities-for instance, spaces of dwelling and conditions of labor-to health status, globally. Based on a set of interdisciplinary literature arranged through anthropological theories, this course will critically engage with notions of health and well-being for indigenous communities, tracing injustices that stem histories of racial, caste- and ethnicity-based, and environmental exclusions. The readings are organized around one central question: What does it mean to be indigenous in a changing planet where social, political, and economic systems are marked by enduring legacies of systemic violence? This graduate and undergraduate level course will introduce contexts within which structural exclusions lead to ill-health and loss of well-being among indigenous communities across the globe. The aim is to develop critical thinking on the political economy and political ecologies of indigenous health as imbricated with issues of social, economic, and environmental justice.

CEGU 21501—Theory and Practice in Environmental Organizing and Activism

This course explores how organizations-civic, private, governmental-working in the field of environmental advocacy construct, deploy and are shaped by distinct discourses governing relationships between nature and society. The environment is a field of social action in which organizations attempt to effect change in large domains like resource conservation, access, stewardship, and a basic right to environmental quality in everyday life. The work of effecting change in these complex domains can assume a variety of forms including public policy (through the agencies of the state), private enterprise (through the agency of the market), ‘third sector’ advocacy (through the agency of nonprofit organizations) and social activism (through the agency of social movements and community organizations). State, market, civil society and social movement organizations are where ideas are transmitted from theory to practice and back again in a recursive, dialectical process. These contrasting forms of organization have different histories, wellsprings and degrees of social power. Moreover, they bring different epistemologies to their claims about being legitimate custodians of nature-that is to say they can be understood genealogically. As such, organizations working to effect environment change are at once animated by and constitutive of distinct discourses governing the relationships between nature and society. The course explores how those distinct discourses are associated with a suite of different organizational realms of social action; the goal is trying to connect the dots between discursive formations and organizational forms.

CEGU 23505—Environmental Ethics

This course examines foundational issues of environmental ethics. What kind of values (economic, aesthetic, existence) are important? What kind of value do individual biota, humans, other species, ecosystems, humans, or inorganic entities have? What is the relationship of humans to the rest of the world? What should it be? Do religious and philosophical traditions contribute to or help address environmental degradation?

CEGU 25704—Environmental Justice in Chicago

This course will examine the development of environmental justice theory and practice through social scientific and ethical literature about the subject as well as primary source accounts of environmental injustices. We will focus on environmental justice issues in Chicago including, but not limited to waste disposal, toxic air and water, the Chicago heat wave, and climate change. Particular attention will be paid to environmental racism and the often understudied role of religion in environmental justice theory and practice. Throughout the course we will explore how normative commitments are expressed in different types of literature as well as the basis for normative judgments and the types of authorities authors utilize and claim as they consider environmental justice.

CEGU 25705—Climate Ethics

Anthropogenic climate change is the largest challenge facing human civilization. Its physical and temporal scale and unprecedented complexity at minimum require extensions of existing ethical systems, if not new ethical tools. In this course we will examine how religious and philosophical ethical systems respond to the vast temporal and spatial scales of climate change. For instance, common principles of environmental ethics such as justice and responsibility are often reimagined in climate ethics even as they are central to the ethical analysis of its effects. In the course, we will take a comparative approach to environmental ethics, examining perspectives from secular Western philosophy, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant), Buddhist, and Indigenous thought. We will also look at a variety of ethical methods. Throughout the course we will focus on communication about climate change as well as articulating rigorous ethical arguments about its causes and implications.

CEGU 25706—Climate Justice

Climate injustice includes the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who benefit little from the activities that cause it, generally the poor, people of color, and people marginalized in other ways. Given the complex economic, physical, social, and political realities of climate change, what might climate justice entail? This course explores this complex question through an examination of various theories of justice; the gendered, colonial, and racial dimensions of climate change; and climate justice movements.

CEGU 26260—Environmental Justice in Principle and Practice I

This course will investigate the foundational texts on environmental justice as well as case studies, both in and out of Chicago. Students will consider issues across a wide spectrum of concerns, including toxics, lead in water, waste management, and access to greenspaces, particularly in urban areas. These topics will be taught in accompaniment with a broader understanding of how social change occurs, what barriers exist to producing just outcomes, and what practices have worked to overcome obstacles in the past. The class will welcome speakers from a variety of backgrounds to address their work on these topics.

CEGU 26261—Environmental Justice in Principle and Practice II

In this quarter, students will learn and practice methods to conduct a research project with a local environmental organization. Building on knowledge gained in the first half of this course, students will examine what makes a condition an environmental justice issue, how to conduct a literature review, how to develop and administer a questionnaire for key informant interviews, and how to access, understand, and utilize Census data. Students should expect to work in the community as well as the classroom, and in close collaboration with classmates. The class will conduct “deep-dive” research into the community selected, and will learn not only about the area, but techniques for how to do community-based research in a manner that acknowledges and appreciates the lived wisdom of the neighborhood’s residents. The result will be a research report delivered to the community organization with students in the class listed as co-authors.

CEGU 27777—Disrupting Environmental Narratives: Colonialism, Race and Toxicity

The environmental humanities have long been dominated by texts and theories from privileged sections of Europe and North America. How might this field be “disrupted” to make way for alternative understandings of our natural world that have always existed and yet remain on the margins of academic discourse? And if we are to focus on works from the “Global South,” how do we account for its internal divisions and hierarchies, such as the oft-invisibilized archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean? In this course, we engage with works by contemporary writers and filmmakers from parts of the world usually grouped as the “Global South” (a label we will interrogate within the course), as a means of nourishing our creative and critical understandings of what it means to tell stories about the various ecologies we inhabit. What is the role of storytelling from the Global South in our perception of environmental change and in the current environmental crisis? How can novels, films, and short stories raise awareness of and emotional engagement with the racialized environmental impact of colonialism and coloniality in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America? We will explore the potential of narratives to challenge common assumptions regarding the environment, race, and power; and discuss how contemporary literature and film address the continuities between colonial pasts and the growing levels of toxicity in multiple regions of the Global South.

Undergraduate Student Research

CEGU Environmental Justice Research Grants

The Environmental Justice Project offers college-wide undergraduate research grants for BA research on environmental justice. The grants are open to all third-year students in the College. Apply by April 27, 2026. For more information, visit the CEGU undergraduate research grants page.

CEGU Environmental Justice BA Prize (2026/27)

Starting in the 2026/27 academic year, CEGU will award the undergraduate research prize in Environmental Justice. Submissions of BA Thesis work explicitly focused on environmental justice topics will be accepted from across the College. Nominations can come from faculty advisors, Directors of Undergraduate Studies, or be self submitted by students. The call for nominations will open in Spring Quarter 2027.

Environmental Justice Internships

CSI Intern — InPLACE at Warren Woods

Apply by March 8, 2026 at 11:59pm

Earth Law Center — Summer 2026 Environmental Policy Intern

Apply by March 9, 2026 at 6:00am

Illinois Environmental Council — Development Intern

Apply by March 11, 2026 at 6:00am

The Nature Place — Creative Communications Intern at Central Conservation

Apply by March 19, 2026 at 11:59pm

The Wilderness Society — Energy Transition Intern

Apply by March 22, 2026 at 10:59pm

Illinois Housing Council — Affordable Housing Intern (Multiple Roles)

Apply by March 22, 2026 at 11:59pm

Summer Opportunities for Climate and Sustainability Policy (Multiple Internships)

Apply by March 23, 2026 at 11:59pm

Environment America — Climate Campaigner

Apply by March 26, 2026 at 10:59pm

Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago Environmental Justice Intern

Environment Illinois — Marketing Intern

PIRG — Climate Solutions Associate

Environmental Justice Programs and Calendar

Environmental (In)Justice

Fourth Annual CEGU Conference | April 23–24, 2026 | Nabil Ahmed, Marco Armiero, Carolina Caycedo, Catherine Coleman Flowers, Christina Gerhardt, Nikki Hoskins, Michael Levien, David Pellow, Julia Watts-Belser

Reflections on an Environmental Justice Game Changer

Frizzell Learning and Speaker Series | April 9, 2026 | Charles Lee, Visiting Scholar, Howard University Law School, Former Senior Policy Advisor for Environmental Justice, US EPA, author, Toxic Wastes and Race(1987), in conversation with Mark Templeton, Clinical Professor of Law and Director, Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, University of Chicago Law School