Format/Structure

Standard panel of presentations plus Q&A

Long Abstract

Dominant academic approaches to environmental justice (EJ) often remain entrenched in Eurocentric legal, philosophical, and political traditions, limiting the field’s ability to fully capture the lived, embodied, and spatial dimensions of environmental harm. This mainstream scholarship, predominantly shaped by Western, policy-oriented, and liberal-democratic frameworks, prioritizes distributive justice and institutional reform. In doing so, it frequently sidelines Indigenous sovereignties, Black radical traditions, decolonial epistemologies, and the embodied, everyday experiences of resistance and survival, reducing justice primarily to a distributive problem.

The continued exclusion of non-White, feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives from dominant environmental discourse has opened EJ movements to elite and corporate co-optation, risking greenwashing and perpetuating inequalities. As a result, dominant EJ paradigms often constrain the integration of decolonial theory, activist experience, and critical epistemologies —those that disrupt mainstream assumptions and offer radical alternatives. However, confronting ecological crises at their root requires grounding EJ in the epistemologies and struggles of those most impacted, recognizing how colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal systems produce and sustain socio-environmental harm.

We build on previous calls to diversify and decolonise EJ theory (Pellow, 2018; Pulido and De Lara, 2018; Rodríguez and Inturias, 2018; Álvarez and Coolsaet, 2020; Sovacool et al., 2023), by inviting stronger engagement with critical literatures on ethnicity, gender, and coloniality. This approach aims to recover and expand the radical roots of EJ as a collective project of liberation beyond merely distributive frameworks. We welcome contributions that foreground activist and grassroots knowledges, illuminating alternative pathways rooted in collective action, mutual care, and resistance. Our aim is to foster a radical research agenda that reclaims environmental justice as an urgent struggle against colonialism, ethnic-based capitalism, state violence and gender oppression (Pellow and Brulle, 2005; Pellow, 2016; Dunlap and Tornel, 2023), and instead centered on sovereignty, self-determination and land-based relational onto-epistemologies (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019).

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