News & Events
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Urban-agrarian entanglements
Urban-agrarian entanglements Climate change is forcing a reconsideration of land use, infrastructural systems, and settlement across urban and agrarian space, with specific, grounded political demands coming from both sides that are often articulated in opposition to each other. Meanwhile, scholars of agrarian and urban studies are rarely in dialogue–despite the fact that places and people…
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Five UC Santa Cruz projects win California Climate Action Grant funding
The UC Santa Cruz campus newscenter shared that a roughly $1.6 million grant project will conduct a first-of-its kind study of how California’s housing crisis affects the growth of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), where the fringes of development reach into natural areas.
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University of California, state partner to award climate action grants
The Santa Cruz Sentinel covered the University of California’s Climate Action Grant awards to UC Santa Cruz faculty and quoted Miriam Greenberg, principal investigator for the Wildland Urban Interface Research for Resilience project.
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Critical Environmentalisms: Overcoming Institutional Obstacles to Meet Students’ Demands for Sustainability Curricula and Action
Read the full article here. This chapter brings together the voices of undergraduates, faculty and staff to share their perspectives about whether UC Santa Cruz is doing enough to address environmental concerns, and how it can better support critical sustainability and action. In the first section, we report the longitudinal results of surveys conducted in…
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Critical Campus Environmentalisms (2023)
Critical Campus Environmentalisms (2023) Institutions of higher education tend to privilege mainstream approaches to environmentalism that reinforce race, class and gender hierarchies around who and what constitutes an environmentalist or environmentalism. As a result, students of color and students from other marginalized backgrounds–who often experience environmental degradation and catastrophe firsthand–may not see their experiences reflected…
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PLANETARY URBANIZATION AND IMPERIALISM: A View from Guåhan/Guam
Read the full article here. Through this article I contribute to debates about planetary urbanization by specifying how imperialism, defined as states restricting the self-determination of other states or peoples, intersects with urbanization. While recent urban theory has explored how urbanization unfolds at scales beyond the city and in relation to global capital accumulation, it…
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Missing the Housing for the Trees (2022)
Missing the Housing for the Trees (2022) Climate change and social inequality are two defining crises of our time. While both of these problems are global in scope, attempted solutions are frequently urban in scale: planners and policymakers increasingly place their hope in cities as places where more just and sustainable ways of living can…
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Chapter 2 | From Romance to Utilitarianism: Lessons on Work and Nature from the New Deal
Read Chapter 2 of this publication here. This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. They examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption—building a world that is sustainable both economically…
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Civilizing swamps in California: Formations of race, nature, and property in the nineteenth century U.S. West
Read the article here. This paper examines the production of settler ecologies through nineteenth century swamp reclamation projects in California. It focuses on the transformation of inland swamps into agricultural land and San Francisco salt marshes and tidelands into urban real estate. I argue that swamp reclamation was both an economic and a racial project.…
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OUT IN SPACE: Difference and Abstraction in Planetary Urbanization
Read the journal article here. A common thread has emerged in recent critiques of planetary urbanization. Whether on empirical, epistemological or theoretical grounds, critics tend to posit ‘difference against abstraction’, arguing that planetary urbanization—as an abstract theory of large-scale phenomena—occludes ‘everyday’ embodied, small-scale and place-based forms of social difference in its production and/or application. Here…
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Seeking Shelter: How Housing and Urban Exclusion Shape Exurban Disaster
Read the journal article here. From extreme weather to infectious disease, disasters now arrive in ever more rapid succession, combining with and compounding one another with increasing complexity and potential for crisis. In this context I suggest a particularly important site for analysis and intervention: the chronic lack of affordable housing and broader processes of…
