Led by social scientists, EcoGovLab brings together researchers and educators across generation, geography, and discipline. A key goal is to bring social science perspective into interdisciplinary environmental research and education. Kim Fortun directs the EcoGovLab. Read about EcoGov Lab researchers here.
EcoGov Lab is affiliated with AirUCI, a solutions-focused, multidisciplinary research unit focused on air pollution, climate change, and sustainability. EcoGovLab also collaborates with many environmental, health and social justice organizations and activists, including MPNA-GREEN in Santa Ana, California; the Descendants Project and Whitney Plantation in St. John Parish, Louisiana; Louisiana Center for Health Equity; the San Antonio Bay Waterkeepers in Calhoun County, Texas; and Justice for Formosa Victims, focused on Vietnam. Our goal is to build durable, reciprocal relationships that make the university a resource for these organizations while creating opportunities for students and faculty to learn from and support them.
EcoGovLab projects include the Asthma Files, Disaster STS Network, Environmental Justice Global Record, and the Reaching for Just Transition seminar series. Read more about EcoGovLab projects here.
The University of California Irvine’s EcoGovLab is developing a new, interdisciplinary curriculum to draw 11th and 12th grade students into the complex, urgent work needed to address environmental justice in different communities, across California and beyond. The curriculum interlaces science, social science and civic education, incorporating multiple standards in these areas. Each of the curriculum’s two units are designed to be delivered in 15 hours of instruction, but can easily be extended beyond that.
One thread of the curriculum asks, “What is environmental injustice,” exploring the many factors (chemical, physical, biological and social) that contribute to environmental injustice, many intersecting effects in communities, and how people in different roles have responded.
Another thread of the curriculum asks, “Where is environmental injustice,” helping students develop case studies of environmental injustice in particular places, starting in their home communities.
The first thread foregrounds the historic and potential role of youth in movements for environmental protection and social change. The second thread draws students into possible career pathways, leveraging the environmental justice research experience gained in this curriculum.
Through this curriculum, students will learn how to access and critically interpret diverse data resources, to move from problem characterization to political strategies and tactics, and to reflect on their own ethical and political judgments. They also will learn to use an array of concepts and analytic frameworks that will be useful to them going forward– helping them characterize stakeholder power dynamics, for example, community assets, and the intersecting form of injustice that combine to produce environmental injustice.
This new curriculum will build on what we have learned teaching these subjects to undergraduates at the University of California Irvine. See a description of the course, Environmental Injustice, here, and examples of student research here.
Thank you for your participation,
Dr. Kim Fortun and members of the writing team from EcoGovLab
This study will help us continue to refine the units based on teacher and student feedback, and will generate important insights into the development of environmental education and literacy in high schools. As part of the study, teachers will be asked to complete one-hour interviews before and after teaching the unit. They will also be asked to complete five short surveys throughout the unit and to collect and share student work with the research team. The research team will also select some classrooms for observation, either in-person or via video-recording.
Teachers selected for the field test will receive a $599 gift card as compensation for participating in a research study about this project.
Teachers participating in our pilot and the refining of our curriculum will make important contributions to the development of environmental education and literacy in high schools. These contributions will be fully acknowledged when the curriculum and related research is published.
Prerna Srigyan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on education to science and governance pathways, and on diverse environmental and social justice pedagogies. Prerna is involved in a range of pedagogical and research projects, including the Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program (leading work on on 11th and 12th grade curriculum); the Beyond Environmental Injustice Research & Teaching Collective (build teaching and learning capacity across borders, linking K-12 schools, universities, community-based organizations, and government agencies); the Spatial Stories Working Group; and as a Contributing Editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Teaching Tools initiative. Srigyan is a member of the Teaching Team for UCI Anthro 25A, Environmental Injustice, a large, general education course that extends from EcoGovLab research.
In previous research, Srigyan studied air pollution governance in Delhi, publishing (with Rohit Negi), Atmospheres of Collaboration: Air Pollution Science, Politics, and Ecopreneurship in Delhi (2021).
Read more about Prerna here
Margaret Tebbe is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on K-12 schools as sites of environmental injustice, and on the potential role of both schools and students in the environmental justice movement.
Tebbe’s current research includes the use of GIS technologies and school district records to characterize environmental risks and hazards in and around K-12 schools in Southern California ( Los Angeles, Azusa, and Santa Ana); the development of 11th and 12th grade climate change and environmental justice curriculum for San Mateo County; and a collaboration with environmental justice educators to build teaching and learning capacity across borders, linking K-12 schools, universities, community-based organizations, and government agencies. Tebbe has build GIS storymaps drawing out environmental injustice at schools in Santa Ana and Azusa, California. She’s also written a policy brief detailing how school facilities are often dangerous and reproduce inequity.
Tebbe is a member of the Teaching Team for UCI Anthro 25A, Environmental Injustice, a large, general education course that extends from EcoGovLab research.
Margaux Fisher is a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to starting her Ph.D., Fisher completed a BA in cultural anthropology at Wheaton College (MA), and an MSc in social anthropology at the London School of Economics. Building on her personal experience of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a high school student, her master’s thesis focused on post-disaster recovery and reconstruction in New Orleans. From this research she created a online ethnographic exhibit on disaster capitalism and the subversive potential of creativity in post-Katrina New Orleans. Her current work includes collaboration with the Louisiana Center for Health Equity, an organization with a daunting goal: to raise Louisiana’s health ranking from 49th in the United States to 40 by 2030. Fisher has worked with the Center’s director, Alma Stewart-Allen, to plan research that will support both her dissertation and the Center’s work. This project includes the development of an ethnographic archive that recollects the politics of health as they are and as they could be imagined otherwise. As a member of EcoGovLab, Fisher has contributed to the development a set of curricular resources to engage high school students and teachers as community-based environmental justice researchers. Fisher has served on the steering committee for the annual Anthropology in Transit Graduate Student Conference in 2022, and for Working Title, a series of ethnographic writing workshops from 2021 to 2022.
Nadine Tanio is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine. Her research focuses on K-16 education, science studies, epistemic justice and transformational pedagogy. Working at the intersection of participatory research and visual ethnography, Tanio has long been interested in innovating the boundaries of educational media, Before returning to academica, Tanio was an independent television producer for PBS and the Science Channel.
Tanio’s research has examined how children’s build expertise about science, medicine and their own bodies and lives. One of short films is “Children’s Voices and Agency in Math Learning.” Tanio’s dissertation, Coming of Age in High-Tech Medicine: Heart Transplantation, Collaborative Visual Storytelling and Transformational Pedagogy (2020), examines how young people learn to care for themselves in the context of modern medicine and disability. Her dissertation research resulted in two short films that have been screened transplant patients and their families, medical practitioners and caregivers; undergraduate students and researchers in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies. Tanio’s publications include “Gendering the History of Science,” Nuncius (1991); “Photographier Bali: la vision, la réflexivité et le réel ethnographique,” Xoana (1994); “From Theory to Practice: How Pre-service Science Teachers Learn to Become Social Justice Educators,” ISLS (2018); Next Generation Radiation Governance (2021), and An Exquisite Corpse: Experiments in Practicing Better Relations as Scholars During Uncertain Uimes (2021).
Learn more about Nadine Tanio here.
Kim Fortun is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine.. Her research and teaching focus on environmental injustice and governance, experimental ethnography, and the poetics and politics of knowledge infrastructure.
Fortun’s research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health hazards, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability. Fortun’s publications include Advocacy After Bhopal Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (2001), “Ethnography in Late Industrialism” (2012) and “Cultural Analysis in/of the Anthropocene” (2021).
Fortun’s current research includes a study of environmental injustice in Santa Ana, California; a study and archive focused on the operations of Formosa Plastics Corporation (collaborating with a global network of environmental researchers and activists); and a collaboration with environmental justice educators to build teaching and learning capacity across borders, linking K-12 schools, universities, community-based organizations, and government agencies. Fortun is the lead instructor for UCI Anthro 25A, “Environmental Injustice,” a large, general education course that extends from EcoGovLab research.
From 2005-2010, Fortun co-edited the Journal of Cultural Anthropology. September 2017- 2019, Fortun served as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the international scholarly society representing the field of Science and Technology Studies. Fortun now co-edits (with historians Scott Knowles and Jacob Remes) a book series for University of Pennsylvania Press, Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster and is in the design group for both The Asthma Files and the Disaster-STS Network. Fortun co-directs the EcoGovLab.
Learn more about Kim Fortun here.
In this 15-hour unit, students explore and analyze diverse cases of climate injustice, in California, across the United States and around the world. Students will move through “snapshots” of environmental injustice in different places, learning to analyze empirical data pointing to pollution and climate hazards, social vulnerabilities, differences among stakeholders, and many other elements of a place-based analysis. Students learn research-informed concepts to guide their analyses and advocacy proposals. They also learn to access and critically interpret different data resources,integrating social science and scientific knowledge. Through exploration of diverse places dealing with environmental and climate justice, students learn to see both patterns and variation across different places. They also have opportunities to pursue what they are most curious about, leveraging their own experience and knowledge.
The lessons in this unit integrate active, problem-based, inquiry and culturally responsive learning, combining science, social studies and civic education. The curriculum is designed in keeping with the recommendations of the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education and the resulting NGSS standards. The curriculum integrates research and teaching materials developed by the University of California’s EcoGovLab.
In this 15-hour unit, students select a school in California to center their development of a place-based case study of environmental and climate injustice. Students’ case study development is guided by the Environmental Injustice (EiJ) Case Study Framework developed by EcoGovLab at UC Irvine to support collaborative and comparative research on environmental injustices in different places. Students’ work on each of the ten questions in the case framework is supported by research “sketches” that guide them through data collection and analysis, work with diverse data visualizations, and research writing. After completing their research sketches, students are ready to build their case studies, producing impressive case study reports that they can share with their families and communities, and point to on resumes and in college applications. While working on their case studies, students learn about diverse career pathways related to environmental health and governance. They also learn how case study research is used in many different fields and types of organizations ( including many government agencies).
Though their focus on a California school in their case studies, students learn new research skills while also leveraging their past experiences and knowledge. They also learn about issues and trends in California that will continue to shape their lives, calling them into civic leadership and diverse environment-related careers. This case study-focused curriculum combines problem and place-based learning, knowledge integration across disciplines and career preparation. The curriculum is designed in keeping with the recommendations of the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education and the resulting NGSS standards. The curriculum integrates research and teaching materials developed by the University of California’s EcoGovLab.