Just Transitions: Expanding the Scope
Webinar, May 1, 2023, 12:00-1:30pm MDT
Presented by the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State
University and cosponsored by the Center for Environmental Justice at CSU and the
Environmental Studies Program at Colorado College
To register please use QR code in poster or this link
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qing81I8SaC41XX6uFE65w
The goals of this webinar are to explore: a) whether the strategy of just transition can be applied across
all transitions; b) whether the strategy of just transition can initiate, as well as respond to transitions; c)
the intersection of the just transition strategy and ecosocial movements; and d) the implications of the
strategy’s mainstreaming. We hope that this will be the first of a series of discussions that will allow a
broader range of advocates, representatives, researchers, and policy makers, starting with our region, to
explore just transition and sustainability politics. If you would like to participate in this network, please
email anyone of us you know or Dimitris at dimitris.stevis@colostate.edu.
Participants:
Ember Bradbury. I am both a first-year PhD student in restoration ecology and an advocate for survivors
of gender-based violence. In both fields, I support the healing of the people and beings that I work with
after they experience trauma through relationship. With this lens, I think of colonialism, patriarchy, and
white-supremacy as mechanisms that create abusive relationships with both each other and ecosystems,
and I think of this healing as a renewal of caring and compassionate relationship. Feminist scholars have
routinely noted how these harmful systems group women, nonbinary, transgender people, and the
land/ecosystems as existing only as resources to be used. Therefore, these relationships have to be
rewritten and reconfigured towards health dualistically. I like just transition because it acknowledges the
need for addressing these harms dualistically. Further, as a restoration ecologist, I think a lot about how
ecosystem restoration (which in my work means the repairing of relationships humans have with morethan-human organisms and the relationships that they have with each other) can be utilized in just
transition methodology.
Matt Henry. I am an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Honors College and an affiliate in the School
of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming. I am particularly interested in the ways cultural
narratives impact climate policymaking and how existing social liberation movements play a critical role
in working toward anti-racist, decolonial environmental futures. I published my first book,
Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (University of Nebraska Press), in
early 2023, and am currently working on a second book focused on the intersections of climate change
and colonialism and decolonial climate justice frameworks. At the University of Wyoming, I conduct
community-focused research on environmental justice and energy transitions in the rural U.S. West.,
with a focus on rural cultural identity, energy labor, and race and gender.
Corina McKendry. I am Director of the Environmental Studies Program and Associate Professor of
Political Science at Colorado College. My research focuses primarily on subnational environment
governance, with a particular emphasis on effectiveness, political legitimacy, and social justice in city
climate policies. My first book, Greening Post-Industrial Cities: Growth, Equity, and Environmental
Governance (Routledge, 2018), examines how city leaders in the Global North negotiate the relationship
between environmental protection, economic growth in the context of neoliberal urban governance. My
second book, Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice (University of Washington Press,
2021) is a co-edited volume that brings together political scientists, historians, geographers, urbanists,
and others to critically examine the tensions between the progressive green urbanism of the Cascadia
region (Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia) and the legacies of settler colonialism and
environmental injustices that also shape the region. In addition to these two books, I have published
numerous book chapters and journal articles on climate justice, community resilience, and energy
transitions, including articles co-authored with Colorado College students. My true professional love,
however, is teaching and supporting students as they stretch and deepen their understandings of
environmentalism, of justice for human and more-than-human communities, and of the complexity and
imperative of acting for a better world.
Josh Sbicca. Joshua Sbicca is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. He is the author
of Food Justice Now!: Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle and co-editor of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food,
Power, and Resistance in the City. Much of his current research, teaching, and advocacy focus on food and
agricultural practices in the prison system. As Director of the Prison Agriculture Lab, he has been working with a
collaborative to translate a nationwide study of farming behind bars into countermaps, visualizations, and stories
for educators, activists, and the public.
Dimitris Stevis (moderator). My current teaching, research and practice focuses on work and nature and
just transitions and is programmatically associated with political practice as in Workers and Communities
in Transition: Report of the Just Transition Listening Project (Labor Network for Sustainability 2021; with
J.Mijin Cha, Vivian Price and Todd Vachon). I explore just transitions as part of the much longer and broader
politics of social and ecological emancipation, rather than as discrete policies associated with particular
transitions, in Just Transitions: Promise and Contestation (Cambridge University Press, 2023)