This is a past event.

A Joint EPSSI/Environmental Engineering Graduate Seminar

Climate disruption, community displacement and adaptation: Bending the challenges and opportunities towards justice

Weaving together theories and perspectives from political ecology, natural hazards, and climate justice, my ethnographic research explores the coupled questions: For people whose identities and cultures are deeply tied to place, what are their lived experiences of rapid environmental changes? Based on that lived experience, what have been the challenges and opportunities of adaptation strategies people are employing to stay in place or relocate? I argue that changes to climate and ecology should not be viewed in isolation as only physical processes but as part of wider socio-political and historical contexts. Socio-political-economic structures are not monolithic; there are people at the center of these structures, and while the structure is bigger than any one person and in large part drives actions, it is people in positions of power who make discrete, discretionary decisions. By looking deeply at the inner-workings of these structures and understanding who and what are pulling the strings, we can begin to reweave this multi-century web of injustice to create cultural shifts and radical transformations.

Biosketch

Dr. Julie Maldonado is the Associate Director for the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), a non-profit, link-tank for policy-relevant research toward post-carbon livelihoods and communities. In this capacity, she serves as co-director of the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences, which facilitates intercultural, relational-based approaches for understanding and adapting to extreme weather and climate events, variability, and change. Dr. Maldonado is also a lecturer in the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Environmental Studies Program. As a public anthropologist, Julie has consulted for the United Nations Development Programme and World Bank on resettlement, post-disaster needs assessments, and climate change. She worked for the US Global Change Research Program and is an author on the 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th US National Climate Assessments. Her recent book, Seeking Justice in an Energy Sacrifice Zone: Standing on Vanishing Land in Coastal Louisiana, emerged from years of collaborative work with Tribal communities in coastal Louisiana experiencing and responding to repeat disasters and climate chaos. The book was released shortly before the release of her co-edited volume, Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement: Risks, Impoverishment, Legacies, Solutions.