Liren Ma - "Too Much Bubble Tea": The Promise and Pearls of Minority Gentrification
In mainstream media accounts, gentrification is usually portrayed as a monolithic process of wealthy, college-educated whites moving into historically underinvested neighborhoods and displacing longtime, low-income minority residents. However, in the past couple of decades, there has been a growing number of low-income minority neighborhoods experiencing dramatic influxes in gentrifiers of the same race. The literature on minority gentrification has focused on whether this phenomenon leads to different outcomes for vulnerable neighborhoods than white gentrification does…
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…