Environment & Community

After graduating from the Environment and Community program I worked as an adjunct lecturer at Humboldt State University in several departments, including in Critical Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In 2013, I was accepted into a PhD program in Politics at University of California Santa Cruz. I am currently ABD (all but dissertation) and anticipate graduating in spring 2019 with a PhD in Politics, and designated emphases in Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. I was invited to teach back at HSU in the CRGS department for the 2017-18 school year.

The E&C program taught me to think and practice across boundaries and borders, starting with the imagined boundaries between humanities and sciences, and the environment and the social. I built confidence in articulating connections between the well-being of human communities and the health of non-human life and the planet. Very practically, as a first generation college student, I was interested in graduate school but not confident about going directly into a PhD program. The environment and community program gave me the cultural and academic resources to go on to further graduate education. Specifically, the faculty created courses and helped me to shape my project in a way that invited critical reading and thinking and provided support for developing graduate level writing skills. All of these things have fundamentally shaped me as a both a scholar and as a teacher.