Date/Time
Date(s) - April 5, 2024
10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Location
LSC 308, Lory Student Center

Categories No Categories

Join us for our SPRING 2024 SOCIOLOGY-IN-PROGRESS guest presenter!

“Place & Displacement in Environmental & Climate Justice” – Dr. Stacia Ryder (Ph.D., ‘19)

Place-based connections are an underexplored framing for environmental and climate injustice. Yet, connections to place form an important part of what people perceive as being threatened by proposed energy infrastructure projects and climate threats. In this talk I will pull together several threads of my recent work across the context of proposed energy development and climate change in the UK and US to highlight the importance of senses of place and place attachment in understanding and addressing issues of equity and justice. Research and examples drawn on include proposed fracking sites in rural England, plans for decommissioning a coastal Welsh village threatened by sea level rise, planning for climate displacement in FEMA Region 8, and risk perceptions tied to the drying of the Great Salt Lake.

DR. STACIA RYDER is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Utah State University. She received her PhD in Sociology in 2019 from Colorado State University and worked as a postdoctoral research in the Department of Geography at the University of Exeter from 2019-2023. Her dissertation work explores how power exacerbates issues of environmental justice in shale development in Colorado. As a postdoctoral researcher she focused on issues of community engagement and procedural justice in proposed shale and geothermal energy projects, as well as proposed just transition decarbonization schemes in the UK. Currently she is exploring research related to planning for disaster and climate displacement. Stacia uses a critical approach to examine how power dynamics create justice issues in environmental, energy and climate contexts. She has authored several articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and book reviews on such subjects. She is also the lead editor of the edited volume “Environmental Justice and the Anthropocene: From Unjust Presents to Just Futures.” Stacia aims to create concrete social change by working with communities to center just and equitable transitions as essential components of climate planning and policy.