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Emily Zhu - Carceral Spaces, Polluted Places: Prisons and the Distribution and Cleanup of Superfund Sites

For decades, incarcerated individuals and antiprison organizers have worked to draw attention to the intersections between mass incarceration and environmental injustice. Only recently has academic scholarship begun to follow suit to examine prisons as a site of environmental risk. In this project, I examine how the presence of prisons is related to the distribution of toxic waste sites in the EPA’s Superfund program and their remediation. Despite limited scholarship, prisons are a particularly critical site to examine questions of environmental justice, given the historical and…

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Julie Chung - Redefining “Inclusive” Science: Hawai‘i’s Multicultural Settler Colonial Context

In response to stark indigenous health disparities, researchers at the University of Hawai‘i Department of Native Hawaiian Health (DNHH) have incorporated Native Hawaiian culture, knowledge, and community voices into their community-engaged research projects. However, these scientists regularly grapple with the legacies of extractive academic research practices in Hawai‘i’s settler-colonial history and present. How do scientists navigate their positionality as researchers and individuals accountable to Native Hawaiian communities? How has navigating this role affected the epistemology…

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