Alison Alkon is an assistant professor in sociology at University of Pacific. Her Ph.D. thesis, entitled Black, White and Green: A Study of Urban Farmers Markets, is a comparative examination of the ways that practices of food consumption become invested with political and cultural meaning in settings with vastly different race and class compositions. By positing access to healthy food as an environmental justice issue, she attends to the racialized and class-inflected natures of food production and consumption. As an ethnographer, Alison attempts to foster greater academic attention to the lived realities of marginalized communities.
Marisol Cortez is a doctoral candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at UC Davis. In her dissertation research she examines and critiques the environmental implications of an institutionalized disgust for everyday bodily functioning, specifically those products and processes we describe as scatological. Through this exploration she hopes to suggest that insofar as our relations to excretory functioning both reflect and recreate relations to nature, there are political stakes in understanding how and why we displace from consciousness the effects of own materiality. More specifically, her project asks: what is the connection between the construction of bodily products as wastes — disgusting and disposable substances — and the displacement of the social and environmental costs of overconsumption onto communities considered disposable? How does the way we imagine the byproducts of our own embodiment impact upon what we do with the byproducts of a consumer economy — where we put them, who is responsible for their disposal, and what longterm effects they have on the wellbeing of people and planet?
Raoul Liévanos is a Ph.D. student in the UC Davis Department of Sociology. He holds an A.A. in Liberal Arts from Allan Hancock College, a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno, and a M.A. in Sociology from UC Davis. He uses comparative historical, field methods, and geographic information systems to pursue his research interests in the areas of environmental and political sociology; social movements, organizations and institutions; critical geography and environmental justice. His current research is looking at the institutionalization of environmental justice into the California Environmental Protection Agency's Advisory Committee on Environmental Justice, as well as the social and spatial organization of environmental inequality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Joaquin Valley regions.
Tracy Perkins is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, with a Master’s degree in Community Development from UC Davis. Her M.S. thesis, entitled Becoming Political: Environmental Justice and Women in California’s Central Valley, explores the ways in which women leaders of the Central Valley’s environmental justice movement became politicized. Tracy is currently creating a photographic exhibit of the environmental justice movement in the Central Valley, accompanied by audio clips and Playback Theater. She is also working on a book of edited oral histories based on the same material.
Jonathan London is an assistant professor in community and regional development. He is also the director at Center for the Study of Regional Change and Senior Researcher of the EJP. London's research focuses on rural social movements, community participation in environmental and natural resource management, and questions of equity in rural development in the Central Valley. London currently represents UC Davis on the Community University Research and Action Alliance for Justice (CURAJ) Advisory Board. CURAJ is a coalition of researchers, legal advocates, and community activists dedicated to applying research to address issues of race, poverty and environmental justice in the Central Valley.
Rebeca Ibanez-Martin is a Ph.D. candidate at the Science, Technology and Society Department at University Complutense of Madrid, Spain. She is currently at the University of California Davis, Sociology Department, undertaking her research in food science and sociology of knowledge.
Julie Sze is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Sze's research focuses on race, class, gender and the environment, the environmental justice movement, urban environmentalism and environmental health. Her book from MIT Press, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Dec. 2006), analyzes the culture, politics and history of environmental justice activism in New York City within the larger context of privatization, deregulation and globalization.
Maggie La Rochelle is a graduate student in Community and Regional Development at UC Davis. Her interests are in environmental justice, the environmental humanities, and in experiential and environmental education.