Papers by Ki'Amber Thompson
How are prisons, policing, pollution related and why is this intersection critical to understand?... more How are prisons, policing, pollution related and why is this intersection critical to understand? Environmental Justice defines the environment as the spaces where we live, work, play, and pray. The Environmental Justice (EJ) Movement has traditionally used this definition to organize against toxics in low-income communities of color. However, within EJ work, prisons or policing have often not been centralized or discussed. This means that the approximately 2.2 million people that are incarcerated are excluded from the conversation and movement. Additionally, communities and activists are identifying police and prisons as toxics in their communities, but an analysis of policing and prisons is largely missing in EJ scholarship. This is an issue because although anti-prison organizers are engaging in EJ discourse and EJ activists are joining forces with anti-prison activists, in general, the EJ field has not thoughtfully engaged with the prison industrial complex or abolitionist discourse. Thus, my thesis topic is at the intersection of incarceration and EJ, bringing abolitionist and EJ discourse together to work toward a common goal of building safe, sustainable, and just communities for everybody. To start, I explore how three conceptual frameworks, EJ, Sustainability, and Abolition, can work together synergistically. Environmental Justice as a Crossroads Field Environmental Justice (EJ) is a dynamic, interdisciplinary field that emerges out of the Civil Rights Movement. EJ verges away from mainstream environmentalism, centering race, class, gender, and justice. In many respects, it is more accessible than mainstream environmentalism, which prioritizes discourses on nature and beauty, environmental protection, species protection, and greening and is overwhelmingly white and lacking diversity; Thompson 11 whereas, EJ has a bottom-up approach and focuses on social justice. This accessibility is precisely what allows EJ to be a dynamic, interdisciplinary, crossroads field. 2 Julie Sze and Jonathan K. London argue that EJ is a field at the crossroads, a point where social movements, public policy, and scholarship meet. Crossroads indicates both divergence and convergence, but Sze and London emphasize EJ research as a location of convergence. Understanding EJ at a crossroads has important implications, including the formation of more sophisticated methodologies, new sites of study, and the capacity for bridging social movements. EJ is a field of research and a praxis that is always contending with issues and methodologies from different fields, social movements, and locations. EJ is constantly expanding to include different identities and cultures, places, and ideas, making it a field that is potentially accessible to all-an advantage that carries great benefit and risk. What is the benefit and risk? According to Sze and London, the benefit of EJ's accessibility is that other social movements can converge and conspire, and potentially fuse to work toward common goals, which means more populations are included in the discourse and movement. For example, ecologists, critics of the prison-industrial complex, anti-racist organizers, advocates of sustainable development, and people interested in transportation, public health, and energy have all been able to access EJ and engage with it to help frame those respective issues. 3 This type of accessibility is critical to ensuring environmental justice for all. Some may oppose this view of EJ at a crossroads, it risks being a kind of theory of everything or risks becoming essentialized into having no real meaning, therefore, they may want to put up
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Papers by Ki'Amber Thompson