Teaching and Mentorship
I teach courses on the politics of environment, food, and justice, including, Soc / Envs 187: Environment and Society; Soc / Envs 253: Race, Class, and Environmental Justice; Soc 4010: Recreation and Resistance; Soc 264: Environmental Movements; and Soc 3113: Green Cafe. I work from a logic my undergraduate mentor, Sociologist Julian Go affirms as, "pessimist of the mind, optimist of the heart" and employ a critical approach throughout my pedagogy. I help students engage with hegemonic critiques articulated in leading sociological and interdisciplinary frameworks to situate environmental conditions via notions of colonial empire, anthropocentrism, and a frank awareness of contemporary dominant cultural logics that we as a shared society have inherited. From deeper awareness, comes greater action, informed by students' unique ethic of caring and personal accountability. As such, we together engage community-based learning and applied sociology in some form throughout all my courses.
Outside of the classroom, I enjoy advising students on a variety of academic and professional endeavors. I am currently advising several undergraduate students at St. Lawrence University, and I serve as a graduate student mentor through a program of the American Sociological Association's Environmental Sociology Section. I enjoy collaborating with student groups to increase community awareness and learning, including through events such as a recent Indigenous / pipeline teach-in and public forum on the racialization of food.
In solidarity with the 2019 Global Climate Strikes, I co-published a teaching module on Climate Justice / Climate Strikes with Corrie Grosse in the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology (2020), featured in the Climate Strike Educator Resource Guide (2019) and Global Campaign for PEACEducation (2019), among other outlets.
Outreach
Together, my partners in research and I aim to develop practical outputs from my analyses that are of more direct use to their communities. Following a working session with the Navajo Nation Breastfeeding Coalition, for example, I summarized my data into a breastfeeding peer counselor support statement distributed to the Navajo Nation Women, Infants, and Children program, Northern Navajo Medical Center, and key decision-makers ahead of the vote on the (now adopted) Resolution on breastfeeding of the NAABIK’ ÍYÁTI’ Standing Committee of the 23rd Navajo Nation Council. I have also shared institutional supports to assist with the Coalition's 2018 and 2019 World Breastfeeding Month celebrations, an indigenous doula training held on the Navajo Nation (Diné Bikéyah) in 2019, and in their community's 2020 response to the devastating Coronavirus pandemic on their Nation. A similar collaborative spirit also informed the African American Breastfeeding Network and my creation of WE-RISE, which I describe further under the above "research" tab.
Service
I am on St. Lawrence University's Sustainability Program Advisory Council and am an active member of C.A.R.E. (Committed to Action for Racial Equity). I recently concluded my tenure as Chair of the Teaching and Practice Committee for the American Sociological Association's Environmental Sociology Section, and as Secretary of the International Lactation Consultant Association's Equity Committee (both positions ran from 2017 to 2019). My efforts contributed to the archiving of environmental sociology teaching resources for educators, revisions of the Environmental Sociology Section's awards to better reflect our Section's regard for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and new diversity, equity, and inclusion training opportunities and mandates for members of the International Lactation Consultant Association. I am an occasional reviewer for Science as Culture, Social Problems, Sociological Inquiry, Environmental Justice, Agriculture and Human Values, and other scholarly journals along with various grant-funding agencies (including the National Science Foundation).
