Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Credit: Justin Luong (ENVS Ph.D. graduate ’22)
Departmental Mission
We strive to acknowledge and practice diversity in our approaches to knowledge, reasoning, learning, departmental composition, and community engagement.
Our department is committed to promoting diversity among our students, staff, faculty, associated researchers, and non-university partners and trying to overcome the legacies of exclusion, colonialism, and dispossession that continue to shape our academic disciplines, university, and society. This mission pushes us to continually challenge ourselves and each other. We’re working to cultivate an atmosphere of inclusion for all our community members, grow the cultural competency of the department, better understand and correct systems of exclusion, and foster a space where a diversity of ideas, values, cultures, and perspectives are welcomed and respected.
If you’re interested in joining this work, check out the programs on this page, which are open to all students, faculty, and staff, consistent with state and federal law and UC policy.
Diversity Committee
The Environmental Studies Department’s Diversity Committee works to advance equity-centered practices across the department. We collaborate with faculty committees—including Personnel, Graduate, Curriculum, and Seminar—to support DEI as a cross-cutting effort that involves all members of our department’s community. We support and co-organize with the Graduate Diversity Council, whose projects are contributing to faculty-grad relationships and to community-building among Ph.D. students.
We also liaise between our department and other initiatives and offices on campus, including the Center for Racial Justice, the Teaching and Learning Center, the Center for Reimagining Leadership, the Center for Agroecology, and the UCSC Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to promote speakers, workshops, pedagogy programs, and other diversity-oriented activities. In all our work, we are committed to countering colonial and racial capitalist systems of oppression within and beyond the university towards cultivating thinking and practice grounded in: critical awareness of the root causes of injustice, reflexivity towards our own biases, privilege, and power; and care in relation to one another and the more than human world.
- Current Members (2023-25): Hannah Waterhouse, Ravi Rajan, Maywa Montenegro (chair)
- All Diversity Committee past members
Milestones
2020-2021: created and distributed department-wide DEIA survey; produced quarterly “Diversity Notes” newsletter
2021-2022: wrote report on DEIA climate in ENVS, including recommendations to the department; convened graduate students across ENVS to debrief on report and gather input on meaningful actions going forward
2021-2022: with TLC, supported graduate student led DEIA pedagogy workshop
2022-2023: assembled Beyond Land Acknowledgement resources (w/ J. Mijin Cha); developed vision and plan for Graduate Diversity Council
2023-2024: launched pilot Graduate Diversity Council; started the Diversity Mapping Project, an effort to canvas DEIA work underway across the department and to identify goals, concrete practices, metrics of progress, and mechanisms to hold ourselves accountable to equity-centered change.
2024-2025: extended Diversity Mapping Project by sharing DEIA canvassing results with the full faculty; working with Grad Committee on advisor/advisee relations; and initiating the development of Disability Justice guidelines for our department.
Graduate Diversity Council
Our Graduate Diversity Council (GDC) began in 2023 as a pilot initiative sponsored by the Diversity Committee and funded by the Pepper-Giberson Chair, Prof. Madeleine Fairbairn. The GDC collaborates on projects that uplift diverse visions and interpretations of the meaning of “diversity,” “equity,” “justice,” and “anti-racism.” We aim to advance epistemic diversity and racial justice, along with strengthening inclusive relationships of trust and collective care within our department’s grad community.
- Current Members (2024-25): Lily Hinojoza, Mike Kowalski, Karen Crespo Triveño
- All GDC past members
If you are a student seeking ethnic, cultural, and general service resource centers on campus, explore the Student Success resources page.
Milestones
2023-2024: surveyed ENVS grad community to learn about interests and needs. Hosted informal grad-only social gatherings to promote collective care, community, and inclusion. Socials included a winter-themed hot cocoa gathering and a spring bowling event.
2023-2024: collaborated with the Diversity Committee to plan and execute the Diversity Mapping Project. The project takes stock of existing ENVS faculty committee diversity-related efforts and identifies priority areas for future work. 2023-24 GDC members led semi-structured interviews with the chairs of ENVS faculty committees, reported back high-level themes, and facilitated small group discussions with faculty toward generating a roadmap to guide departmental DEIA efforts, short and longer term.
2024-2025: implementing the Graduate Information Xchange, a monthly workshop series led by graduate students that covers equitable teaching pedagogy, amongst other topics and sponsored with $5,000 from the TLC Graduate Pedagogy Fellowship.
2024-2025: implementing the ENVS Peer Mentor Program, a vehicle to pair senior graduate students with those new to the department to foster intercohort and cross-disciplinary integration, in collaboration with Dani Klawitter and funded by the Graduate Student Commons mentorship program.
Justice-centered initiatives led by department community members
People of Color Sustainability Collective (PoCSC)
The PoCSC aims to make the university a leader in mainstream sustainability and environmental justice in recognition of changing demographics and pressing ecological challenges. PoCSC accomplishes this through workshops, speaker series, social media campaigns, and campus research. PoCSC is housed under the American Indian Resource Center and works in partnership with College Nine and John R. Lewis College and the Sustainability Office.
Affiliated people
Co-founded by Rebecca Hernandez, Elida Erickson, Flora Lu, Adriana Renteria, and Nancy Kim, the initiative is led by Angel Riotutar (AIRC Director) and Ileana Brunetti (Assistant Director of Sustainability for Equity and Curricular Programs for the Sustainability Office). Past PoCSC graduate student interns and research assistants include Tashina Vavuris, Chris Lang, and Tracy Liu, working alongside undergraduates (see staff listing here).
Critical Environmentalisms
Critical Environmentalisms seeks to foster a critical, social justice-centered approach to environmental studies that centers on themes of power relations, (in)equity, accessibility, epistemology, and social (in)justice to study the interrelationships between humans, non-humans, and the environment. Project activities have included a faculty and staff survey, publications, and an undergraduate research fellowship. Led by ENVS faculty Emily Murai, Hillary Angelo, Flora Lu, and undergraduate Serena Campbell.
Learn more about the Center for Agroecology and the Global Environmental Justice Observatory (GEJO) on our Affiliated Research Centers and Initiatives page.
Equity-related publications authored by ENVS faculty
- A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future (2024) by J. Mijin Cha
- Building More Epistemically Inclusive and Environmentally Equitable Universities (2024) by Flora Lu, Emily Murai, and Serena Campbell (*This paper, part of a special issue on DEIJ in Environmental Studies, emerged from the Critical Environmentalisms project.)
- Teaching Environmental Justice: Practices to Engage Students and Build Community (2023) edited by Sikina Jinnah, Jessie Dubreuil, Jody Greene, and Samara S. Foster
- The Global Environmental Justice Observatory: fostering students’ knowledge production, professionalization and belonging (2023) by Ravi Rajan and Flora Lu
- Critical Campus Sustainabilities: Bridging Social Justice and the Environment in Higher Education (2023) edited by Flora Lu and Emily Murai
- Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty, and Pandemic Prevention (2023) by Maywa Montenegro de Wit
- Faculty Diversity in California Environmental Studies Departments: Implications for Student Learning (2022) by Amani Taylor, Arien Hernandez, Aysha Peterson, and Sikina Jinnah
- Selling out the Delta: Farmland investment and small farmer land access in Mississippi (2022) by Madeleine Fairbairn, Elsa Calderon, and Jordan Treakle (National Family Farms Coalition).
Land Acknowledgment
“The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.”
- Read “Your Land Acknowledgement is Not Enough” by Joseph M. Pierce, Cherokee Nation Citizen.
- See also Beyond Land Acknowledgement, a resource guide we have compiled for those who, in addition to acknowledging land, want to support #landback campaigns and other efforts that center the needs and sovereignties of Indigenous communities.