{"id":20566,"date":"2021-08-04T10:03:54","date_gmt":"2021-08-04T10:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uwb.edu\/?p=20566"},"modified":"2023-09-07T14:47:09","modified_gmt":"2023-09-07T21:47:09","slug":"brinda-sarathy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.uwb.edu\/ias\/faculty-and-staff\/brinda-sarathy","title":{"rendered":"Brinda Sarathy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Professor and Dean<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Brinda<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ph.D. Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, University of California, Berkeley
M.S. Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, University of California, Berkeley
B.A. International Development and Environmental Studies, McGill University<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Office: UW1-390D
Email: bsarathy@uw.edu <\/a>
Mailing Box: 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teaching<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I encourage students to analyze environmental problems from a number of different perspectives. This process often involves difficult, but necessary, conversations about the intersections of racial segregation, environmental degradation, and resource management policies in the United States and abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My teaching on environmental justice seeks to change the way students approach environmental problems \u2014viewing these issues as also tied to historically specific dynamics of capital, race, class, gender, and other axes of difference (some might call this a political ecology analysis).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research\/Scholarship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My research and scholarship engage with questions of environmental justice, public wellbeing, equity, and access. As an example, my first book, Pineros: Latino Labor and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest, provided a critical social history of a previously hidden group of forest workers in Southwestern Oregon\u2019s Rogue Valley and made the structural plight of immigrant workers more central to debates over natural resource management on public lands, labor standards, and immigration policy in the United States. This research continues to inform policy and non-profit conversations on labor and natural resources.
My post-tenure research and scholarship similarly engage topics directly relevant to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including the dynamics of community-based learning and social justice pedagogy. For example, in my co-authored article, \u201cEnacting Environmental Justice through the Undergraduate Classroom: The Transformative Potential of Community Engaged Partnerships,\u201d I detail efforts to make the classroom a space in which to engage environmental justice beyond a narrow and short-term focus on the disproportionate impacts of environmental harms on low-income and minority communities to a more expansive and consistent attention to histories of inequality and processes of marginalization.

In my co-edited volume, Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure and Expertise, I examine the processes by which toxic spaces have become normalized over time. Our contributors pay close attention to the means by which these places have been created, examining how and when they have been policed or ignored, or sometimes actively hidden. As toxic landscapes have become increasingly interwoven into economic structures and everyday life, we repeatedly see a tendency to minimize danger, and to reject the lived experience and testimony of those harmed by exposure to toxic substances, individuals who tend, disproportionately, to come from disadvantaged communities.

My current research project explores the history of the first Superfund site in California, the Stringfellow Acid Pits, to better understand how places are produced in the context of invisible flows: of toxics, of groundwater, and less told stories of social mobilization. This work considers how institutions of expertise often exclude the experiences of those most exposed to harm and, despite deep and persistent uncertainties, authority figures have been called on to minimize concerns about hazardous substances, thus facilitating industrial, military, and economic expansion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Selected Publications<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Books<\/h3>\n\n\n\n