Ellen Kohl

Research Interests

Environmental justice, environmental governance, intersectional geographies, and science-policy interface.

Recent Research Activities

My research interests sit at the intersection of environmental governance, activism, and systems of oppression. Through my work I examine how intersectional oppressions create and maintain persistent places of environmental injustice. My current research can be broadly understood through three interconnected categories:

Environmental Justice Governance. For this project, I examine the interactions between activists and the state, primarily in the US context through the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). I complicate the state by applying an intersectional lens to understand the functions within the state, and how bureaucrats resist or unintentionally replicate existing systems of oppression. I also examine the ways environmental justice activist resist the state, either by turning from the state, or by leveraging the resources of the state. I am currently working on a project at the intersections of children’s environmental health and environmental justice, with a specific focus on the role of science in policy making and activism.

Novel Forms of Environmental Governance. I draw on intersectional theories, critical race theories and Black geographies to examine novel forms of environmental governance. I examined the Rights of Nature movement, which employs a rights-based environmental governance to extend legal rights of personhood to nature. I argue that the operationalization of rights of nature in the US does not represent a paradigm shift but instead replicates western white liberal conceptions of legal rights. In doing so, it does not shift human-environmental interactions, but instead reinforces entrenched social-legal-environmental. I am currently looking at the ways Taiwan, which has no voice on the global diplomatic stage, uses environmental partnerships and activism as a form of green diplomacy.

Intersectional Geographies. Drawing on Black geographies, Latinx geographies, and feminist geographies I examine the limitations of trying to put people into boxes through the research process and in understand and analyzing people actions. These frameworks provide the basis of all my work and can be seen in the discussions above on the US EPA and environmental justice activism. I have also collaborated with Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon to analyze cross-racial talk within the research process and challenging notions of who is and can be an activist. We are currently beginning a project which seeks to broaden notions of food activism by examining the quiet and everyday work done around food within the Black Methodist Church in South Carolina.

Selected Publications

Google Scholar

2023. Kohl, E. and J. Walenta. “Placing Nature’s ‘Rights’: Limitations and Potential for Rights of Nature Activism” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113(1): 274-290.

2023. McCutcheon, P* and E. Kohl.* “The Everyday and Quiet Resistance of Black Southern Activists.” In Lawson, V. and Elwood, S. with Daigle, M., Gutiérrez Garza, A., Herrera J., Kohl, E., Lewis, J., McCutcheon, P., Ramirez, M. Reddy, C., and Y. Valencia (Eds) Abolishing Poverty: Towards Pluriverse Futures and Politics

2022. Kohl, E. “Making Visible the Invisible: Storytelling, Environmental Justice, and The Newtown Florist Club” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 21(1): 33-48. https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/2091

2022 Kohl, E., Sullivan, M., Chambers, M., Sellers, C. “From ‘Marginal to Marginal:’ Environmental Justice Under the Trump Administration” Environmental Sociology 8(2): 242-253. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2021.2015548

2021 Kohl, E., Sullivan, M., Chambers, M.M., Sellers, C., Cordner, A., Fredrickson, L., Ohayon, J., and Varner, J. “The Problem of Accountability: Environmental Justice and the Trump Administration” Environmental Justice 14 (5): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2021.0012

2020 Kohl, E. “‘Some we’s weren’t part of we’: Intersectional politics of belonging in U.S. environmental justice activism” Gender, Place, and Culture 28 (11): 1606-1626. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2020.1832968

2019 Kohl, E. “‘When I take off my EPA Hat:’ Using Intersectional Theories to Examine Environmental Justice Governance” The Professional Geographer 71(4): 645-653.

2019 McCutcheon, P.* and E. Kohl.* “You’re Not Welcome at My Table: racial discourse, conflict and healing at the kitchen table” Gender, Place, and Culture 26(2): 173-180.

2016 Pulido, L., E. Kohl and N. Cotton. “State regulation and environmental justice: The need for strategy reassessment” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 27(2): 12-31.

2015 Kohl, E.* and P. McCutcheon.* “Kitchen table reflexivity: Negotiating positionality through everyday talk” Gender, Place and Culture 22(6): 747-763.

Selected Recent Publications

2023 Sullivan, M. and E. Kohl “Protecting Future Generations: Community Activist’s Role in Using Science to Protect Children’s Environmental Health” National Women’s Study Association, Baltimore, MD, Oct 26-29.

2023 Kohl, E. and M. Sullivan. “Children’s Environmental Health, Environmental Justice and the State,” Annual Meeting, American Association of Geographers, Denver, CO, Mar 23-27.

2022 Kohl, E., P. McCutcheon, and J. McCray. “Feeding Souls and Spreading Justice: Black Food Workers in South Carolina’s Black United Methodist Churches,” Annual Meeting, American Association of Geographers, New York, NY, Feb 25 – Mar 1.

2021 Kohl, E.and J. Walenta. “Speaking for the Trees: The Temporal and Spatial Construction of Legal Rights of Nature” International Symposium on Geographies of the law: Inquiries into the space-law tangle, Turin, Italy, December 13-14

2021 Kohl, E. and J. Walenta. “The Liberal Problem of Whiteness: Extending Rights to Nature.” Race, Ethnicity, and Place, Baltimore, Maryland, October 14-16.

2021 Kohl, E. “Responding to Crisis: Environmental justice activist’s responses to Trump Administration’s environmental deregulation” International Workshop on Environmental Justice Bridging research, policy and activism for environmental justice in times of crises, Freiburg, Germany,  May 19 – 21 (virtual).

2021 Walenta, J. and E. Kohl. “Legal Rights for Whose Nature?” Annual Meeting, American Association of Geographers, Virtual Meeting. Apr 7 – 11.

2019 Kohl, E. “Moving Mountains, not Junkyards: Intersectional approaches to environmental justice research” Annual Meeting, American Association of Geographers, Washington, DC. Apr 3 – 7.

Recent Honors and Awards

• • Fulbright Scholar, Taiwan 2022-2023
  • Examining Children’s Environmental Health Science and Science-Based Regulatory Policy National Science Foundation with Marianne Sullivan 2022-2025
  • The Andy Kozak Faculty Contribution to Student Life Award (SMCM) 2023
  • Pandion haliaetus Professorship in Environmental Studies (SMCM) 2021 – 2023
  • Implications of Trump Administration Policies on Environmental Justice Activists David and Lucille Packard Foundation via Environmental Data Governance Initiative 2020
  • International Workshop Award for the Implementation of “Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters: The role of spirituality in African American Environmental Activism in the U.S. South.” Antipode Foundation with Priscilla McCutcheon. 2017

Courses Taught

Introduction to Human Geography; Resources, Environmental and Society; Introduction to Environmental Studies; Race and Place; Race, Gender, and Environmental Justice; Introduction to Cultural Geography