Developing deeply intersectional environmental justice scholarship

Environmental justice and natural resource extraction: intersections of power, equity and access

“…But as the articles presented here clearly show, sometimes even when you bring your folding chair, the door to the meeting room is locked. To understand who is locked out, we draw on the concept of intersectionalitya concept that helps account for how people experience historical and sociological dynamics of power, privilege and oppression through the multiple social positions they occupy (Braun 2015;Di Chiro 2008;Ryder 2018;Malin and Ryder 2018). In this issue, LeQuesne (2019) and Mincyte (2019), for example, analyze the ways in which intersectional sociological positions variously shape people's experiences of environmental inequity.…”

Privilege and responsibility in environmental justice research

“…In the meantime, we can be reasonably certain that the prevalence of environmental justice studies in Environmental Sociology is not related simply to a lack of publication opportunity elsewhere given several other journals (including Local Environment, Environmental Politics and Environmental Justice) publish hundreds of articles each year on environmental justice. Our special issues on environmental justice suggest at least two lines of innovation: the first, bringing more sophisticated engagements with other disciplines including genomics, engineering and data science into sociology (Joyce and Senier 2017); the second bringing more deeply sociological understandings of power and inequality to multidisciplinary and other environmental justice studies (Malin and Ryder 2018). Both lines of innovation suggest that if there is a uniquely sociological approach to be developed here it must be one that reflects seriously on how sociological contributions to environmental justice scholarship might best respect the aspirations, knowledge and perspectives of those we represent through our scholarship.…”

“…To remember that racial hierarchies interact with others (gender, class, national, etc.) in ways that are multiplicative, not additive (Malin and Ryder 2018). And most importantly, to respect peoples' knowledge and the language they use to articulate their own group affiliations and identities.…”

Ecologically unequal exchange: A theory of global environmental injustice

“…The EJ movement is multidimensional and intersectional. It addresses issues concerning both humans and other species, such as human health outcomes and biodiversity loss; it also addresses multiple interconnected dimensions of inequality, such as race, class, gender, and structural position in the global hierarchy (Malin & Ryder, ; Pellow, ). Temper, Walter, et al () argue this makes EJ activism well situated to return agency to those affected by taking an approach that combines social and environmental concerns, confronts both global and local power relations, and has an awareness of impacts across space and time.…”