Environments and Societies at the Crossroads: Socio-Environmental Justice in Europe and the Americas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Nov 16, 2026 - Nov 17, 2026
Workshop at UC Berkeley | Convener: Simone M. Müller (University of Augsburg), Isabel Richter (German Historical Institute Washington, Pacific Office)
Protests against the siting of a toxic waste incinerator in Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982—and similar protests in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas – moved the intersection of racial discrimination and toxic exposure into the center of public attention (Murdock 2021). Since then, an increasing number of activists, researchers, and politicians have worked with the umbrella term environmental justice to investigate a wide range of topics. These include urban and industrial environments, labor conditions (Flanagan 2000; Pellow 2002, Carruthers 2008; Janos/ McKendry 2021; Rector 2023, Tau Lee 2023), the production of toxins, hazardous waste, and radioactive material (Malin 2015, Arndt 2020, Müller 2023), conservation of national parks and ecotourism (Wakild 2011; Honey 1999), the history of climate change (Morgan 2024), processes of privatizing resources and public goods (Bauer 1998; Shiva 2002; Robinson 2013), activism and environmental movements (Anthony 2002; Cairns 2021;), and people of color and environmental justice (Carneiro da Cunha 2000; Voyles 2015; Gilio-Whitaker 2019). Researchers in Central and South America have played a significant role in shaping the recent trend of analyzing decolonial environmental justice (Castro Gomez/Grosfoguel 2007; Escobar 2011; Álvarez/Coolsaet 2018; Rodriguez 2021).
The workshop “Environments and Societies at the Crossroads” seeks to bring graduate students, postdocs, and senior scholars working on the history of social and environmental justice into conversation. By examining the historical connections between environments and social justice in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe and the Americas, our workshop will explore the rise of modern environmentalism and the environmental justice movement including crucial topics and developments prior to the 1970s. Understanding social injustice and ecological decline as twin crises in the age of extractivism and industrialization, we invite historical contributions that explore the intricate relationship between societies and environments including topics such as debates on industrial pollution, labor rights or the distribution of wealth to projects of nature conservation, wildlife protection, and decolonization.
We are particularly interested in contributions exploring the intersection of societies and environments at the crossroads, testing both their contestations as well as their alignments. We will use social practices, discourse and debates, and experiences in environmental and social history as a lens to reflect on a variety of methodologies, historical strategies, places, and spaces in the Americas and Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as arenas to negotiate questions of justice, including topics such as:
- Case studies that illuminate how justice is defined in this context. Who defines, and which lines of intellectual thought are considered ‘just’?
- Which terms and practices existed prior to the late twentieth-century environmental justice movement?
- How has the relationship between social and environmental justice been negotiated?
- How are distributional justice of environmental burdens and social burdens debated, i.e., who is paying for the damage, and who is being held responsible for it?
The in-person workshop will be held in English and will be hosted by the GHI Pacific Office at UC Berkeley. During the workshop we will discuss pre-circulated papers limited to 5000 words. Proposals, which should include a paper title, an abstract of no more than 250 words, a short CV, and contact information (address, phone, email), must be submitted online in a single pdf (the file name should be the last name of the applicant) by January 16 , 2026.
Please contact Heike Friedman if you have problems submitting your information. Decisions will be sent out by the end of January 2026.
Accommodations will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers. Participants will be expected to make their own travel arrangements. Some subsidies for travel will be available upon request, especially for those who might not otherwise be able to attend the conference, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources. There is no registration fee.
References
Álvarez, L. & Coolsaet, B., Decolonizing environmental justice studies. A Latin American perspective (2018), DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2018.1558272
Anthony, Carl, The Civil Rights Movement, and expanding the boundaries of environmental justice in the San Francisco Bay Area 1960-1999. Oral history transcript 2002 with an introduction by Luke W. Cole. Interviews conducted by Carl Wilmsen in 1999. Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
Arndt, Melanie, Tschernobylkinder. Die transnationale Geschichte einer nuklearen Katastrophe, Vandenhoeck+Ruprecht: Göttingen, 2020
Arndt, Melanie, Environmental History, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 23.08.2016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.700.v3
Bauer, Carl J., Against the current. Privatization, water market, and the state in Chile, Kluwer Academic Publishers: Boston, 1998
Cairns, Kathleen A., At home in the world. California women and the postwar environmental movement, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 2021
Carruthers, Jane, Dainfern and diepsloot: Environmental justice and environmental history in Johannesburg, South Africa, in: Environmental Justice, 1 (2008) 3, pp.121-125
Castro-Gómez, S./ Grosfoguel, R. (eds.), El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Siglo del Hombre Editores: Bogotá, 2007
Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela/ de Almeida, Mauro W. B., Indigenous People, Traditional People, and Conservation in the Amazon, in: Daedalus 129 (2000) 2, pp. 315–38
Ebert, Thomas, Soziale Gerechtigkeit. Ideen, Geschichte, Kontroversen, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: Bonn, 2. Aufl. 2015
Escobar, Arturo, Epistemologías de la naturaleza y colonialidad de la naturaleza. Variedades de realismo y constructivismo, in: Cultura y Naturaleza (2011), pp. 49–71
Flanagan, Maureen A., Environmental justice in the city: A theme for urban justice in the city, in: Environmental history, 5 (2000) 2, pp.159-164
Garcia, Laura Ibarra, El reclamo de justicia social en la historia de México, MaPorrua: Ciudad de México, 2016
Hakel, Christina, Soziale Gerechtigkeit: eine begriffshistorische Analyse, OGB Verlag: Wien, 2005
Honey, Martha, Ecotourism and sustainable development: who owns paradise, Island Press: Washington DC, 1999
Jäger, Pia, Soziale Gerechtigkeit im Wandel. Ein idealistisches Konstrukt und/oder ein Mittel zur politischen Akzeptanzsicherung, Nomos: Baden-Baden, 2017
Gilio-Whitaker, Dina, As long as grass grows: the indigenous fight for environmental justice. From colonization to Standing Rock, Beacon Press: Boston, 2019
Janos, Nik/ McKendry, Corina (eds.), Urban Cascadia and the pursuit of environmental justice, University of Washington Press: Seattle, 2021
Lorenz, Walter, The emergence of social justice in the West, in: Michael Reisch (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Social Justice, Routledge: New York, 2014, pp.14-26
Malin, Stephanie A., The price of nuclear power. Uranium communities and environemntal justice, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 2015
Morgan, Ruth A., Climate change and international history. Negotiating science, global change and environmental history, Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2024
Meringolo, Denise D., Introduction: social justice and public history: the networks, goals, and practices that shaped our noble dream, in: Denise D. Meringolo (ed.), Radical Roots: public history and a tradition of social justice activism, Amherst College Press: Amherst, 2021, pp.1-20
Murdock, Esme G., A history of environmental justice. Foundations, narratives, and perspectives, in: Brendan Coolsaet (ed.), Environmental history. Key issues Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon, New York, 2021, pp. 6-17
Müller, Simone. The toxic ship. The voyage of the Khian Sea and the global waste trade. Seattle: Washington University Press, 2023.
Ornstein, Allan C., Social justice. History, purpose and meaning, in: Social Science and Public Policy (2017) 54, pp. 541–548
Pellow, David N., Garbage wars. The struggle for environmental justice in Chicago, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2002
Rector, Josiah, Toxic dept: an environmental justice history of Detroit, The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2023
Rodriguez, Iokiñe, Latin American decolonial environmental justice, in: Brendan Coolsaet (ed.), Environmental history. Key issues, Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon, New York, 2021, pp. 78-93
Robinson, Joanna L., Contested water. The struggle against water privatization in the United Stated and Canada, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2013
Shiva, Vandana, Water wars. Privatization, pollution and profit, South End Press: Cambridge, MA, 2002
Tau Lee, Pamela, Community and union organizing, and environmental justice in the San Francisco Bay Area 1967-2000. Oral history transcipt 2023 with an introduction by Luke W. Cole. Interview conducted by Carl Wilmsen in 1999. Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
Voyles, Traci Brynne, Wastelanding. Legacies of uranium mining in Navajo country, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2015
Wakild, Emily, Revolutionaly Parks. Conservation, social justice, and Mexico’s national parks 1910-1940, University of Arizona Press: Tuscon, 2011