Peer-Reviewed Research
“Framing queer climate justice”
Forthcoming (PS: Political Science & Politics)
Climate justice movements and scholars have established that marginalized communities, including people of color, Indigenous Peoples, women, and the Global South, are most vulnerable to climate change. Recently, scholars also have established that the climate crisis places LGBTQ+ communities in precarious positions. Yet, we know little about how LGBTQ+ activists practice climate justice and build political bridges between LGBTQ+ and climate justice movements. By analyzing queer climate activism, I find that bridging the US climate and LGBTQ+ movements share three elements: (1) vulnerability and intersectional analysis, (2) survival and resilience, and (3) play. In bridging the movements, activists “queer” climate justice by spatially shifting on what grounds or issues to fight, prefiguring worlds not yet in existence on a larger scale, and reimagining how to perform climate activism.
“Power beyond powerlessness: Miners, activists, and bridging difference in the Appalachian coalfields”
2020, Energy Research & Social Science
Powerful coal interests construct activists as radical “others” who oppose mountaintop removal at the expense of jobs, but how can we deconstruct these “other” identities? Focusing on the Coal River Valley in West Virginia, where miners have opposed environmental justice activists, I examine how these oppositional groups—activists and miners—can build power by engaging in deconstructive bridging. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, I diagnose the affective barriers to miners’ participation in the environmental justice movement and explore how activists have attempted to bridge to miners. I unpack the differences between activists and miners and present the miner mountaineer consciousness, or a sense of linked fate with those in the community rather than with the industry, to explain how activists and miners could stand together. While barriers between activists and miners persist, bridging attempts to deconstruct difference by emphasizing shared positive place-based attachments and negative affective industrial attachments. In the context of intractable environmental and social conflicts, the study builds on how deconstructing “other” identities undercuts the powerful by aligning workers and environmentalists.
Inhumane environments: Global violence against environmental justice activists as a human rights violation
2020, Co-authored with Matto Mildenberger and Leah Stokes, in A Research Agenda for Human Rights
How AAPIs in Congress responded to COVID-19
2020, Co-authored with Pei-te Lien, AAPI Nexus
Over the past decade, thousands of community environmental leaders and indigenous land rights activists have been assassinated. There is an urgent need for the research community to document the full scale, logic, and effects of these human rights violations. In this chapter, we first explore diverse literatures on ecological human rights, indigenous environmental justice, and violence. We then outline our research priorities for future work on this topic: first, new work to study the meso-level logic of violence against environmental activists; second, the development of new datasets to document the scope of this violence; and third, a sustained focus on intersectional analyses of the impact of this violence, particularly on women.
The 116th Congress is making history in representational politics with the highest number of AAPI legislators in U.S. history. However, AAPI legislators’ increased visibility comes at the same moment as white supremacist politicians and pundits racialize a global pandemic. How have AAPI legislators responded to the COVID-19 outbreak? Our findings provide preliminary support for our hypotheses that AAPI legislators are more likely to be sponsors of AAPI-targeted legislation and that AAPI women legislators are more likely to introduce bills targeting AAPI constituents than their male counterparts. In addition, AAPI women legislators as a whole are more likely to sponsor legislation to advance interests of the intersectionally disadvantaged than AAPI men legislators during our study period (February to mid-May 2020).