In the Classroom

Suggested readings:

Activism

• Harrison, Jill. 2008. “Abandoned Bodies and Spaces of Sacrifice: Pesticide Drift Activism and the Contestation of Neoliberal Environmental Politics in California.” Geoforum 39:1197-1214
• Leeper Buss, Fran, ed. 1993. Forged under the Sun/Forjada bajo el Sol: The Life of Maria Elena Lucas. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Perkins, Tracy.  2014. “The Environmental Justice Legacy of the United Farm Workers of America: Stories from the Birthplace of Industrial Agriculture.” Tales of Hope and Caution in Environmental Justice. The Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes, Humanities for the Environment, August 10.
• Pulido, Laura.  1996. “The Pesticide Campaign of the UFW Organizing Committee, 1965-71.” Pp. 57-124 in Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

 

Policy change

• Harrison, Jill. 2006. “‘Accidents’ and Invisibilities: Scaled Discourse and the Naturalization of Regulatory Neglect in California’s Pesticide Drift Conflict.” Political Geography 25(5) June: 506–529.
• Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2011. Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Liévanos, Raoul S., Jonathan K. London, and Julie Sze. 2011. “Uneven Transformations and Environmental Justice: Regulatory Science, Street Science, and Pesticide Regulation in California.” Pp. 201-228 in Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement, edited by G. Ottinger and B. R. Cohen. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• London, Jonathan K., Julie Sze, and Raoul S. Liévanos. 2008. “Problems, Promise, Progress, and Perils: Critical Reflections on Environmental Justice Policy Implementation in California.” UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 26(2): 255-289.

 

Science and environmental health

• Nash, Linda. 2007. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

Industrial agriculture

• Arax, Mark and Rick Wartzman. 2003. The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. New York: PublicAffairs.
• Walker, Richard A. 2004. The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California. New York: The New Press.

 

Farmworkers

• Lopez, Ann Aurelia. 2007. The Farmworkers’ Journey. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Mitchell, Don. 2012. They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press.

 

Alternative agriculture

• Brown, Sandy and Christy Getz. 2008. “Privatizing Farm Worker Justice: Regulating Labor through Voluntary Certification and Labeling.” Geoforum 39:1184–1196
• Harrison, Jill. 2008. “Lessons Learned from Pesticide Drift: A Call to Bring Production Agriculture, Farm Labor, and Social Justice Back into Agrifood Research and Activism.” Agriculture and Human Values 25(2):163-167.

 

Cumulative health impacts in the San Joaquin Valley

• London, Jonathan, Ganlin Huang and Tara Zagofsky. 2011. Land of Risk/Land of Opportunity: Cumulative Environmental Vulnerability in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Davis, CA: UC Davis Center for Regional Change.

 

Gender and environmental justice activism

• Perkins, Tracy. 2012.  “Women’s Pathways Into Activism: Rethinking the Women’s Environmental Justice Narrative in California’s San Joaquin Valley.” Organization & Environment, 25(1):76-94.

 

Literature

• Yogi, Stan, Gayle Mak, and Patricia Wakida. 2007. Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books.

 

Public-facing research and campus-community collaboration

• Cable, Sherry, Tamara Mix, and Donald Hastings. 2005. “Mission Impossible? Environmental Justice Activists’ Collaborations with Professional Environmentalists and with Academics.” Pp. 55-76 in Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement edited by D. N. Pellow and R. J. Brulle. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2011. “Parsing Participation” in Action Research: Navigating the Challenges of Lay Involvement in Technically Complex Participatory Science Projects.” Society and Natural Resources 24:702-716.
• Perkins, Tracy. 2015. “On Becoming a Public Sociologist: Amplifying Women’s Voices in the Quest for Environmental Justice.” Pp. 88-92 in Sociologists in Action on Inequalities: Race, Class and Gender edited by S. K. White, J. M. White and K. O. Korgen. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.
• Pulido, Laura. 2008. “FAQ’s: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions About Being a Scholar Activist.” Pp. 342-364 in Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics and Methods of Activist Scholarship edited by C. R. Hale. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Sarathy, Brinda. 2014. “Engaging Students in Community-based Partnerships for Environmental Justice: Reflections on CCAEJ’s “Organizing Academy.”” Pp. 77-82 in The Pitzer College 50th Anniversary Engaged Faculty Collection: Community Engagement and Activist Scholarship edited by T. H. Peterson. Claremont, CA: Pitzer College Community Engagement Center.

 

See other reading ideas at the UC Davis Environmental Justice Project’s Environmental Justice Research Inventory.

See activity and assignment ideas for teaching environmental justice themes, as well as a syllabus collection, at Voices from the Valley.