Sustaining (in)Justice

Guest: Dr. Lydia Jennings   **This episode was recorded in April 2024** Through the lens of environmental soil science, we explore mining practices, land reclamation, environmental health, and Indigenous data sovereignty. Our conversation ultimately asks: what does it mean to engage these issues in ways that are accountable to and shaped by Indigenous communities?

Guest: Dr. Sonja Klinsky   Climate justice is deeply political and shaped by context. In this episode, Sonja Klinsky joins to discuss how climate justice is negotiated globally, the role of the UN in amplifying voices from the Global South, and the technical meaning and significance of transitional justice in addressing legacies of large-scale harm on oppressed and repressed people groups.

Guest: Adriene Jenik   Art is often perceived to be confined to galleries, but what if it played a central role in designing just and sustainable futures? In this episode, Adriene invites us to consider how art, imagination, and the immaterial - emotion and spiritual insight - shape our responses to climate change and justice. We also explore her ECOtarot project that continues to offer climate readings to people around the world, which bridges climate data and people's lived climate experiences.

Guest: Dr. Regina Shands Stoltzfus   In this episode, we discuss Regina's book Been in the Struggle: Pursuing an Antiracist Spirituality. Together, we explore how being in and sustaining struggles for justice and sustainability shape both personal and collective life. The conversation welcomes listeners of all spiritual backgrounds, including those who do not identify as spiritual.

Guest: Timara Crichlow, M.S.   This conversation begins by discussing Tim's master's thesis on the distribution of urban tree canopy and its impact on neighborhood life satisfaction. From there, we draw on Tim's expertise to explore how broader ideas - history, creativity, community, politics, anthropocentrism/ecocentrism - shape the meaning and practice of sustainability.

Guest: Fatima Garcia   Sustainable built environments require key decisions be made about retrofitting and architectural design. How do architects make these decisions? Fatima highlights the significance of community and histories of the built environment in her architecture and design work.

Guest: Dr. Danae Hernandez-Cortes   In this conversation, Danae defines distributional justice in the context of environmental economics and markets. We also discuss the efficacy of carbon markets as a tool to address unequal distributions of pollution in California and Mexico.

What are social positionalities? And, how do we navigate positionalities counter-hegemonically? Ame and Khampha reflect on some of their own intersecting identities and positionalities in research and the workplace. Listeners are also encouraged to reflect on the role of positionalities in their lives.

What is the role of corporations in today’s sustainability transition? In this conversation with Lukas, we interrogate corporate sustainability. Ultimately, we engage the question: what is being sustained as a result of corporate sustainability initiatives?

Growth of many kinds is often identified as a sustainability issue to be addressed. In this conversation, we discuss what it means to collectively respond to urban growth. Urbanization poses many challenges including increasing pressures on rural farmers in India. Increasing pressures of urbanization require decisions be made about about groundwater usage.

Industrialization has forced the field of sustainability to think about the impact of toxic Particulate Matter (PM) on air quality. This conversation navigates air quality and justice implications of air monitoring policies in the United States.

By now listeners are used to podcast guest’s introducing themselves with relevant sociopolitical positionalities. In this discussion with Taína, we navigate the relevance and significance of thinking about positionality and identity as relates to sustainability. Topics of food systems and religion guided how we discuss the role of sociopolitical power, privilege, identity, and positionality.

Issues of water scarcity are central to sustainability concerns. Questions on how water incentives and water allocation policies might address scarcity problems are engaged in this discussion on water economics with Katie.

Today's conversation navigates meanings of sustainability amid rising temperatures and rapid urban development. This discussion identifies how certain communities are exposed to heat stress more than others. Climate adaptation and mitigation responses are compared to urban heat.

Resiliency is a crucial principle to many sustainability efforts, but when is resilience harmful? In a conversation introducing ideas of settler colonialism in sustainability education Haven and Khampha discuss how settler colonial oppression is a resilient and ongoing process.

In conversation with Jake Swanson, a Project Manager and Commissioner, complexity is introduced as a key concept in processes addressing entangled sustainability and justice issues.

In an interview led by Norah Jerinic-Brodeur, undergraduate contributor to the podcast, listeners will learn more about host and creator of Sustaining (in)Justice, Khampha, and what the Sustaining (in)Justice podcast is about.