Children in California’s San Joaquin Valley, like children in many settings around the world, are growing up in landscapes dramatically shaped by climate change and environmental injustice. Despite this, what children know about their changing world, their visions of its future, and their capacity to act are poorly understood and recognized. My dissertation is designed in response to this gap, centering participatory methods that will draw out and further develop children’s environmental knowledge. The research will enroll high school students as co-researchers and co-facilitators in an innovative, ethnographic after-school program for younger students, investigating what both groups know and imagine through photovoice, participatory mapping, and collaborative analysis.
The project also seeks to understand how participation in such collaborative ethnographic projects can transform children’s knowledge and subjectivity. This research will produce new understandings of children’s environmental knowledge, and of methods that can be used to learn about this knowledge in different settings. It will build, amplify, and preserve the knowledge and voices of children in the San Joaquin Valley through student-generated case studies and supporting digital archives of environmental justice at the two focal schools.
I plan to begin my dissertation fieldwork in Fall 2025. In preparation for fieldwork, I am continuing to work on building an archive of environmental injustice in the Valley in collaboration with undergraduate students at UC Irvine. I am also developing the first draft of the curriculum that my dissertation project will use.
