Kieren is also a co-founder of the Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective (CPISC), a growing network of scholar-activists who conduct interdisciplinary applied research, mentor students, and support the equitable study of the Pacific. Outside of UC Berkeley, they serve as an instructor at Mount Tamalpais College in San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where they teach Ethnic Studies, emphasizing environmental justice activism and systemic racism in urban planning. They have an MESc from Yale University and a BS from Johns Hopkins University.

Summer also holds an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Lehigh University. She organizes with UAW 4811.

Brie is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, titled “When the Street Lights Come On: How a ‘Smart City’ became a Surveillance State,” explores how smart street lights became a tool for law enforcement, even when this was not their intended use, and the consequences for historically criminalized communities of color. She also interrogates how cities address residents’ concerns regarding accountability, transparency, and privacy rights when adopting surveillant technologies. Through qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival research, Brie traces the historical uses of street lights for surveillance and social control, culminating in the smart street lights of today.

Brie also has a Masters in Public Policy/Master of Arts in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Brandeis University and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Gender Studies from New College of Florida

He is working on a dissertation in collaboration with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, the Indigenous people of the McCloud River (Winnemem Waywaket). Titled Listening to Lendada Nur (Ancient, Wise Salmon), the dissertation is an ethnographic and historical investigation into the Winnemem Wintu’s partnership with wildlife agencies to restore salmon to their ancestral watershed for the first time since the Shasta Dam blocked the cultural and ecological keystone species from returning home 80 years ago.

Tribal members are assisting in the scholarship by identifying research objectives, interpreting archival and ethnographic data and developing the theoretical framework based on concepts from the Winnemem Wintu language.

Brian’s research explores how the impacts of climate-change-driven sea-level rise are racialized and compounded by infrastructure and heritage preservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry. The Lowcountry is a region constituted by slavery and the tidal flow of water. With four consecutive years of hurricanes and 89 days of tidal flooding in Charleston in 2019, the Lowcountry’s relationship with the ebb and flow of tides remains central, though it now figures as a harbinger of future destruction. However, as local governments forge new tidal relations by building and adapting infrastructure, enduring racial geographies are revealed in the preservation of antebellum heritage landscapes and the everyday flooding of Black communities, many of whom are located on low lying former plantation lands.

Brian’s dissertation offers new formulations of coastal resiliency, while laying out empirical information backing activists and environmental justice organizations in the Lowcountry and their urgent and valid claims for reparative flood mitigation for their communities.

He is collaborating with South Carolina flood activists and environmental justice advocates. Brian received his BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from the Honors College at University of Georgia, and his MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz

Bruno is also a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous studies. His research focuses on environmental and climate justice movements in the U.S. northwest, imperialism and militarism, and film methodologies. His dissertation examines the politics of wildfire and prescribed burning in Karuk aboriginal territory in the unsettled colonial present.

As wildfires throughout the U.S. west intensify, Indigenous fire practitioners fight for sovereignty and survivance while navigating between, on one side, a militarized firefighting apparatus premised on the settler state’s entitlement to environmental authority, and on the other side, a broad-based colonial impulse to appropriate and commodify Indigenous knowledge. Through participant observation, collaborative filmmaking, and interviews, Bruno’s dissertation tracks how settler colonial relations of power and property can be reaffirmed or disrupted by the increasing frequency of environmental crises. A committee of Karuk cultural practitioners advises on the work.

A settler raised on occupied Nipmuc land in Massachusetts, Bruno is an award-winning filmmaker with a BFA in film from New York University and an MA in folklore from the University of Oregon. Bruno’s project has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Cornell’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Before Yale, she completed a master’s degree in Environmental Justice at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. There she researched how African American college students navigated the outdoor recreational landscape. In 2017, she won the Clyde Woods Prize for best graduate paper in Black Geographies, for her paper “Build A Wall Around Hyde Park: Race, Space and Policing on the Southside of Chicago 1950-2010,” which is currently under review for The Antipode. You can access her article on Police Violence and Environmental Justice here.

She is the author of the essay “Islands of Freedom: The struggle to desegregate Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain National Park 1936-1941” in the forthcoming edited collection Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, Environmental History.

The legacies of the Allotment Era have produced a highly-fragmented pattern of jurisdiction over both surface land and subsurface minerals in this checkerboard landscape, where alternating tracts of land are complexly administered by federal, tribal, state, and private entities. Jurisdiction not only has profound implications for where, how, and if extraction takes place: it also affects who gets to have a say in the process.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic and archival research in northwestern New Mexico and in Eastern Navajo Agency, Silas’s research analyzes how different jurisdictions parse out components of the region’s ecology for management purposes. Silas attends to both the extra-local and large-scale cumulative effects of extraction that are not contained by the jurisdictions that exist to manage them. Silas’s dissertation traces how relations of sovereignty, territory, and ordinary life are shaped in part through frictions engendered in contests to control energy extraction. Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Silas earned a BA in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University and an MA in Geography from the University of Toronto. Silas came their dissertation research through involvement in the climate justice movement.

As an urban environmentalist and political ecologist, Corbin examines the relationships between society and nature within the built environment by investigating the concept of the green city within the context of the United States. Her dissertation focuses on how the relationships between race, class, and access to green space have changed from 1960—prior to the Civil Rights Acts—to 2019, after Oakland, California began establishing its sustainability agenda and during an intensifying gentrification process.

Corbin questions how environmental policies and practices in green cities are impacting the lived experiences of low-income residents and communities of color and their access to public green spaces today and what that could mean for future populations living in green cities.

As the chair of the City of Oakland Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission (PRAC) Corbin serves her community through civic engagement by researching, reporting, and making recommendations to City Council on Park and Recreation policies and as the PRAC liaison to three Recreation Advisory Councils, the local community park stewards.

Corbin is also an executive committee member of the California Outdoor Engagement Coalition focused on getting youth who reflect the overall demographics of California into the outdoors by providing transformational experiences.