Environmental Justice and Wellbeing Across American Geographies: Race, Place, and Community Power

UNDERGRAD | Environmental Justice and Wellbeing Across American Geographies examines how race, ethnicity, immigration, gender, class, and state policy shape communities’ relationships to land, housing, labor, infrastructure, environmental exposure, and public resources. Beginning in New York’s Capital Region, the course moves across the Black Midwest and Rust Belt, Chicago, Detroit, Flint, Gary, and East Chicago before comparing these cases with the South and Gulf Coast and with communities in the West facing agricultural pollution, water insecurity, wildfire, and Indigenous land loss. A continued comparative arc connects Black environmental experiences across regions and links directly to the Black Midwest Initiative Environmental Justice Collaboratory. Through weekly demographic mapping and an interactive StoryMap project, students learn to read spatial evidence, trace the shared patterns and distinct histories of environmental racism, and document the knowledge and organizing traditions Indigenous, Latino, Arab, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Jewish American through which communities pursue justice, accountability, and repair.

About

Ola U. Kalu, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral research fellow jointly appointed at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. A sociologist and former literacy educator, she studies how place shapes life across the life course from schooling to reproductive health and birth outcomes grounded in Black geographies, racial capitalism, and Black feminist theory. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University at Albany, SUNY, along with an Education Specialist degree in Curriculum and Instruction and brings eleven years of K–12 classroom experience to a practitioner-scholar approach to teaching. Her current research maps how neighborhood conditions shape environmental exposure, housing, and birth outcomes in American cities, and how communities organize for justice, accountability, and repair. In the classroom, she pairs demographic and spatial analysis with community-produced knowledge, inviting students to read maps as arguments about power. She leads public education on reproductive and environmental justice and is based in West Philadelphia.