Geographies of Justice

Catalog description

The justice concept has been a topic of interest within various academic and policy realms concerned with the inequities experienced by racial groups, socio-economic class, and ethnicity. The environment justice movement is generally understood to have begun in the early 1980s with a series of events that demonstrated the inequitable distribution of health hazards and risk. While much work in environmental justice has usefully focused on the disproportionate exposure of poor and minority populations to environmental hazards, conceptualizations of justice have expanded in recent years to include systematic and comparative research within urban and rural populations, industrialized and developing contexts, access to and control over resources, as well as unwilling exposure to hazards, processes and institutions of environmental governance. These trends have resulted in greater attention to the social processes that create and perpetuate inequality on the basis of race, gender, income, or other social categories. In exploring the 'fast conceptual transfer' of the environmental justice concept to other settings, Walker and Bulkeley (2006: 655) suggest emerging interest in distribution between nation-states, an expansion of terms to include gender, age and future generations, and intersections with the vulnerability literatures to examine the threat of natural and produced risks. This course engages with the history and future of social and environmental justice. We begin by examining the emergence of the environmental justice movement in the United States and subsequent export of the justice concept to other topics, including sustainable development and climate change, and within other settings, including Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. In exploring the diverse ways that justice is being applied at the present time, we will also question the future viability for justice as a conceptual and organizational tool. Course Objectives This course has four primary objectives: - Examine the history of the concept of environmental justice and the environmental justice movement in the United States; - Consider multiple definitions of environmental justice such as procedural and distributive justice; - Examine the application of the environmental justice concept to other topics, including sustainable development and climate change, and within other settings, including Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America; and - Consider future directions for environmental justice.