Annual DEIJ Seminar Series

Register for the zoom webinar here. Talk and speaker information below: 

Seeking Environmental Data Justice through Feminist Ethics of Care

The Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), a network of scientists, technologists, and activists, emerged as a counterforce to the climate-change-denying Trump Administration in 2016, advocating for environmental data justice through innovative civic engagement and political activism. Now, EDGI's Environmental Enforcement Watch project embodies feminist ethics of care by collaborating with environmental justice groups and integrating diverse forms of knowledge to develop computational Notebooks. These tools enable communities to critically engage with public and federal environmental data, uncovering and addressing the inequities embedded within. This talk will focus on practicing care while working with environmental data and the communities that need it.

About the speaker: Dr. Lourdes Vera is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Environment & Sustainability at SUNY University at Buffalo. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Northeastern University and is a former high school science teacher. As an environmental sociologist and civic scientist, she works with communities near industrial activity such as fracking to monitor their air for contaminants. She also serves on the Coordinating Committee of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, envisioning and building digital tools and research infrastructures for environmental data justice. Her interdisciplinary work spans environmental health, social science, and critical theory.

Register for the zoom webinar here. Talk and speaker information below: 

The Ecology of Possession: De-naturalizing colonial ontologies in environmental management

In this talk, Lightning will critically examine environmental management as co-produced with colonial power structures. She will explore the need to re-examine foundational understandings of the environment, challenging colonial biases in scientific knowledge production. By doing so, she urges us to work towards approaches that acknowledge the colonial biases deeply entrenched in scientific research and create space for Indigenous-led science.

About the speaker: Keara Lightning is a PhD student in Wildlife Ecology in the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta. She is from Samson Cree Nation. Keara's M.A. thesis, titled "The Ecology of Possession," critically examined environmental management as a site of knowledge production that is shaped by colonial narratives of land and property. Her Ph.D. research focuses on collaborating with Indigenous communities to revitalize cultural burning practices and address wildfire management. 

Register for the zoom webinar here. Talk and speaker information below: 

Bridging Environmental and Conservation Data Justice

An important and exciting new area of research addresses data justice issues in conservation. At the same time, data has re-emerged as central to environmental justice initiatives. In this talk, Dr. Nost will propose that gaps, precision, prioritization, and embodiment are key themes around which environmental and conservation data justice can be more closely thought together. Each theme explains how data factors into recognitional, epistemological, and distributional harms: when there are inevitable gaps in data collection, when precision is emphasized over context, when data is used to prioritize scarce investments, and when it’s extracted from embodied experience. Nost suggests that advancing EDJ and CDJ in tandem means emphasizing sufficiency rather than gaps, care and not precision, abundance and solidarity over prioritization, and experience instead of extraction. Nost will conclude by offering some specific tactics that might help researchers in this. 

About the speaker: Eric Nost is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He teaches undergraduate courses in nature-society geography and mapping as well as graduate courses in the Master's of Conservation Leadership program. Nost is also a co-coordinator of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative's Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW), which brings people together to analyze publicly available socio-environmental data. A key challenge for researchers is assessing data technologies’ promises to help society solve sustainability issues related to species, habitat, and ecosystem services conservation. Taking on this challenge, Nost's research focuses in particular on understanding tech's human dimensions - its design, use, maintenance, and consequences. He is interested in how environmental data systems come to be and also experimenting with them towards just and equitable ends.