Critical Environmental Justice

While a range of scholars, including anthropologists, have worked closely with the environmental justice (EJ) movement, this chapter contends that anthropology’s contributions to EJ lie not only in on-the-ground research and political advocacy, but also in how the discipline has challenged the normative frameworks that have traditionally guided this engaged work. Specifically, this chapter identifies three areas of anthropological scholarship that build on what David Pellow has called “critical EJ studies.” The first, Legibility and Expertise , explores how scholars study the contested knowledge politics of exposure. The second, Porosity and the Body , looks at the blurred boundaries between self and environment. The third, Temporality and Multigenerationality , considers how EJ bends concepts of time, inheritance, and remediation. Through this discussion, we approach anthropology capaciously, looking at a range of ethnographic and archival scholarship that destabilizes liberal humanist frameworks of harm, culpability, and repair.