This thesis will examine the effects of residential segregation, exclusionary zoning, and gentrification on low-income minorities in inner cities. The research will show the relationship between housing inequalities and institutional classism and racism. In addition, the research will examine the use of public policies and regulations that maintain the existing isolation and concentration of minorities and low-income families through disinvestment.

In Chile’s neoliberal economy, large-scale timber plantations controlled by national and multinational forest corporations have expanded significantly on traditional indigenous territories. Chile’s forestry sector began to expand rapidly in 1974, the year following the military coup, owing to the privatization of forest lands and the passing of Decree 701. That law continues to provide large subsidies for afforestation, as well as tax exemptions for plantations established after 1974. As a consequence, conflicts have developed between indigenous communities and forestry companies, with the latter actively supported by government policies. The Mapuche people, the largest indigenous group in Chile, have been demanding the right to control their own resources. Meanwhile, they have been bearing the physical and social costs of the forestry sector’s growth. Since democracy returned to Chile in 1990, governments have done little to strengthen the rights of indigenous peoples. Government policy in this area is ill-defined; it consists mainly of occasional land restitution and monetary compensation when conflicts with the Mapuche threaten to overheat. This, however, is coupled with heavy-handed actions by the police and the legal system against Mapuche individuals and groups. From a political ecology perspective, this thesis examines how indigenous communities resort to various political strategies to accommodate, resist, and/or negotiate as political-economic processes change, and how these responses in turn shape natural resource management and, it follows, the local environment. My findings are that the environmental and social impacts associated with landscape transformation are shaped not only by structural changes brought about by economic and political forces but also, simultaneously, by smaller acts of political, cultural, and symbolic protest. Emerging forms of political agency are having expected and unexpected consequences that are giving rise to new processes of environmental change. Evidence for my argument is provided by a case study that focuses on the political strategies followed by the Mapuche movement. I analyze the obstacles that are preventing the Chilean government from addressing more effectively the social, economic, and cultural needs of indigenous peoples through resource management policies. Government policies toward the Mapuche have not encompassed various approaches that might facilitate conflict resolution, such as effective participation in land use plans, natural resource management, the protection of the cultural rights of indigenous communities, and the Mapuche people’s right to their own approaches to development. Employing Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, while the Mapuche have widely contested the state’s neoliberal policies, they have nevertheless been drawn into governing strategies that are fundamentally neoliberal in character. These strategies have reconfigured their relationship with the state, NGOs, and foreign aid donors. Operating at both formal and informal levels of social and political interaction, this new mentality of government employs coercive and co-optive measures to cultivate Mapuche participation in the neoliberal modernization project, while continuing to neglect long-standing relations of inequality and injustice that underpin conflicts over land and resources.

In Chile’s neoliberal economy, large-scale timber plantations controlled by national and multinational forest corporations have expanded significantly on traditional indigenous territories. Chile’s forestry sector began to expand rapidly in 1974, the year following the military coup, owing to the privatization of forest lands and the passing of Decree 701. That law continues to provide large subsidies for afforestation, as well as tax exemptions for plantations established after 1974. As a consequence, conflicts have developed between indigenous communities and forestry companies, with the latter actively supported by government policies. The Mapuche people, the largest indigenous group in Chile, have been demanding the right to control their own resources. Meanwhile, they have been bearing the physical and social costs of the forestry sector’s growth. Since democracy returned to Chile in 1990, governments have done little to strengthen the rights of indigenous peoples. Government policy in this area is ill-defined; it consists mainly of occasional land restitution and monetary compensation when conflicts with the Mapuche threaten to overheat. This, however, is coupled with heavy-handed actions by the police and the legal system against Mapuche individuals and groups. From a political ecology perspective, this thesis examines how indigenous communities resort to various political strategies to accommodate, resist, and/or negotiate as political-economic processes change, and how these responses in turn shape natural resource management and, it follows, the local environment. My findings are that the environmental and social impacts associated with landscape transformation are shaped not only by structural changes brought about by economic and political forces but also, simultaneously, by smaller acts of political, cultural, and symbolic protest. Emerging forms of political agency are having expected and unexpected consequences that are giving rise to new processes of environmental change. Evidence for my argument is provided by a case study that focuses on the political strategies followed by the Mapuche movement. I analyze the obstacles that are preventing the Chilean government from addressing more effectively the social, economic, and cultural needs of indigenous peoples through resource management policies. Government policies toward the Mapuche have not encompassed various approaches that might facilitate conflict resolution, such as effective participation in land use plans, natural resource management, the protection of the cultural rights of indigenous communities, and the Mapuche people’s right to their own approaches to development. Employing Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, while the Mapuche have widely contested the state’s neoliberal policies, they have nevertheless been drawn into governing strategies that are fundamentally neoliberal in character. These strategies have reconfigured their relationship with the state, NGOs, and foreign aid donors. Operating at both formal and informal levels of social and political interaction, this new mentality of government employs coercive and co-optive measures to cultivate Mapuche participation in the neoliberal modernization project, while continuing to neglect long-standing relations of inequality and injustice that underpin conflicts over land and resources.

In Chile’s neoliberal economy, large-scale timber plantations controlled by national and multinational forest corporations have expanded significantly on traditional indigenous territories. Chile’s forestry sector began to expand rapidly in 1974, the year following the military coup, owing to the privatization of forest lands and the passing of Decree 701. That law continues to provide large subsidies for afforestation, as well as tax exemptions for plantations established after 1974. As a consequence, conflicts have developed between indigenous communities and forestry companies, with the latter actively supported by government policies. The Mapuche people, the largest indigenous group in Chile, have been demanding the right to control their own resources. Meanwhile, they have been bearing the physical and social costs of the forestry sector’s growth. Since democracy returned to Chile in 1990, governments have done little to strengthen the rights of indigenous peoples. Government policy in this area is ill-defined; it consists mainly of occasional land restitution and monetary compensation when conflicts with the Mapuche threaten to overheat. This, however, is coupled with heavy-handed actions by the police and the legal system against Mapuche individuals and groups. From a political ecology perspective, this thesis examines how indigenous communities resort to various political strategies to accommodate, resist, and/or negotiate as political-economic processes change, and how these responses in turn shape natural resource management and, it follows, the local environment. My findings are that the environmental and social impacts associated with landscape transformation are shaped not only by structural changes brought about by economic and political forces but also, simultaneously, by smaller acts of political, cultural, and symbolic protest. Emerging forms of political agency are having expected and unexpected consequences that are giving rise to new processes of environmental change. Evidence for my argument is provided by a case study that focuses on the political strategies followed by the Mapuche movement. I analyze the obstacles that are preventing the Chilean government from addressing more effectively the social, economic, and cultural needs of indigenous peoples through resource management policies. Government policies toward the Mapuche have not encompassed various approaches that might facilitate conflict resolution, such as effective participation in land use plans, natural resource management, the protection of the cultural rights of indigenous communities, and the Mapuche people’s right to their own approaches to development. Employing Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, while the Mapuche have widely contested the state’s neoliberal policies, they have nevertheless been drawn into governing strategies that are fundamentally neoliberal in character. These strategies have reconfigured their relationship with the state, NGOs, and foreign aid donors. Operating at both formal and informal levels of social and political interaction, this new mentality of government employs coercive and co-optive measures to cultivate Mapuche participation in the neoliberal modernization project, while continuing to neglect long-standing relations of inequality and injustice that underpin conflicts over land and resources. / Science, Faculty of / Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute for / Graduate

Travel narratives of the nineteenth century frequently became vehicles for colonialist discourse, strategically representing the Other(s) in order to justify their subjugation, and their land as a site of opportunity. W.W.H. Davis's travel narrative, El Gringo: New Mexico and Her People (1857) was no exception. This dissertation begins by arguing that we need to read El Gringo as a rhetorical text, that Davis's objective in portraying both the land and the people was to represent New Mexico as inherently "disponible," a term used by Mary Louise Pratt to indicate "available for capitalist improvement." Working from this assertion, I use the methodology of the Discourse-Historical Approach developed by Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak to explore the development of racialized constructions of New Mexican identity, their ideological relationship to "disponibility," and how these constructs have been reproduced intertextually through discourse. As accepted beliefs concerning the state, they continue to be recontextualized in new situations, notably to justify the disproportionate location of nuclear weapons-related industries, waste, and research activities within the state. Just as Davis and other earlier writers had used words such as "barren," "isolated," "unpopulated," and "wasteland," to rationalize the US presence, US government officials used these very terms a century later to argue that New Mexico was the location-of-choice for building and testing the first nuclear weapon. I argue that a direct discursive connection exists between the US colonization of New Mexico in 1846 and its nuclear colonization in 1942. As part of the ongoing legacy of colonialism, the language used to justify New Mexico's nuclear burden has marginalized the state's original inhabitants, diminishing their land rights and creating situations of environmental racism, such as the Church Rock incident on the Navajo Reservation. In some cases, Native Americans and Nuevomexicanos were "disappeared" from the discourse entirely, as with several Pueblo communities living adjacent to the site of the Manhattan Project. Dialectically, the nuclear colonization of New Mexico has transformed Manifest Destiny as well, reconfiguring its initial purpose to ensure US hegemony internally, to the ability of the US to maintain nuclear hegemony worldwide.

This research is about examining the way in which racialized environmental violence contributes to exploitative social relations becoming embedded in the everyday world. I argue that the space of the everyday has been produced through cycles of social relations proceeding from and/or tied to racialized environmental violence. I continue the work of critical scholars in asserting that social and environmental violence is linked in the same ideological impulse which seeks to hide itself behind a variety of alienating processes. The slow way in which environmental violence works is particularly impactful in these processes because of its attritional lethality, contributing to premature death. I studied these processes by examining the histories surrounding the site of a construction day labor firm in Richmond, Virginia. My methodology includes archival research on newspapers, public documents, and secondary sources establishing that the patterned co-location of social and environmental violence does not occur by chance.

abstract: Sustainability and environmental justice, two fields that developed parallel to each other, are both insufficient to deal with the challenges posed by institutional environmental violence (IEV). This thesis examines the discursive history of sustainability and critiques its focus on science-based technical solutions to large-scale global problems. It further analyzes the gaps in sustainability discourse that can be filled by environmental justice, such as the challenges posed by environmental racism. Despite this, neither field is able to contend with IEV in a meaningful way, which this thesis argues using the case study of the Flint Water Crisis (FWC). The FWC has been addressed as both an issue of sustainability and of environmental justice, yet IEV persists in the community. This is due in part to the narrative of crisis reflected by the FWC and the role that knowledge production plays in that narrative. To fill the gap left by both sustainability and environmental justice, this thesis emphasizes the need for a transformational methodology incorporating knowledge produced by communities and individuals directly impacted by sustainability problems. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Sustainability 2019

Environmental racism has recently entered the realm of academic inquiry and although it currently sits in a marginalized category, Indigenous and environmental communities and scholars have acknowledged it as an important subject of critical inquiry. With roots in southern Americana history, environmental racism has had a limited scope of study within Canadian universities. Few Canadian scholars have presented the rippling effects of this critical phenomenon to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students and the challenge to bring this discourse to the universities of Canada remains significant. Mainstream educators and environmentalists dismiss discourses of environmental racism, ecological destruction and the correlating demise of Indigenous peoples’ knowledges, cultures and wellness as an insignificant and sometimes radical propaganda. In opposition, Indigenous peoples globally are countering this dismissal by telling their stories to ensure all have access to the discourses of environmental racism found within the ecological destructions of traditional lands and the cultural genocides of their peoples. The stories of their histories and the subsequent activism define the resistances found within Indigenous communities. These same stories show the resiliencies of Aboriginal peoples in their quest for self-determination. Using an Indigenous research methodological framework, this study seeks to provide an understanding of the complexities associated with incidences of environmental racism found within Canadian Aboriginal communities. It further seeks to find, analyze and report the depth of resistance and resilience found within the storywork of Aboriginal women. The researcher attempts to gain perspective from eight Aboriginal women of four distinct Nations by focusing on the context of their lives in relationship to their leadership decisions and actions from a worldview of Indigenous knowledge, eco-justice and peace. The lived experiences of Aboriginal women from the traditional lands of the Cree, the Denesuline, the Inuit and the Métis are critical to an analysis of how environmental racism is dismantled and wellness sought. The storywork of these participants provides answers as to how these Aboriginal women have come to resist environmental racism and why they currently lead others in the protection and sustainability of traditional lands, Aboriginal knowledge, culture and kinship wellness. Framed within Indigenous research methodology, all researcher actions within the study, including the collection, analysis and reporting of multiple data sources, followed the ceremonial tradition and protocols of respect and reciprocity found among Aboriginal peoples. Data from semi-structured qualitative interviews and written questionnaires was analyzed from the supportive western method of grounded theory. Findings revealed the strength of Storywork through the primary themes of Woman as Land and Woman as Healer. These are discussed through the Sisters’ embodiment of resistance, reflection, re-emergence and re-vitalization. The ways in which these Indigenous women have redeemed their knowledges and resurged as leaders is integral to the findings. The study concludes with an emphasis on the criticality of collective witnessing as transformation.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-01-20T14:28:32Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 3691838 bytes, checksum: 26645feaffeecbd991cdd3ae0a5c92f3 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-20T14:28:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 3691838 bytes, checksum: 26645feaffeecbd991cdd3ae0a5c92f3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-08-26 / This work is motivated by the concern expressed by educators with the use of technology in education in the context of environmental education, when the Brazilian reality is black majority in the classroom of public education. Your goal is to investigate the potential of Learning Object reuse for the study of the environment in a critical approach, paying attention to the occurrence of the practice of environmental racism. In this sense, we sought to understand the reasons which led to environmental education as a topic to be addressed in Brazilian education, reflecting on the environmental education in the postmodern scenario and its specificity in dealing with issues that affect the majority of black people. The following is the identification of learning objects available for the study of the environment, so that it is feasible to point out the learning object features in the reuse potential is satisfactory and meets the issues related to teaching and learning processes, including Join the black population. The research is characterized as applied, qualitative and exploratory. The applied technical procedure was the content analysis. How locus, the International Bank of Educational Objects was elected (BIOE) as Learning Object search field (OA) focused on the study of the environment. It was concluded that the critical study of perspective of the environment can be achieved with the use of OA with a greater degree of reuse, in which it seeks, through its content, favor the approach of specific issues, such as environmental racism. / O presente trabalho tem como motivação a preocupação expressa pelos educadores com a utilização das tecnologias na educação no contexto da educação ambiental, quando a realidade brasileira é de maioria negra na sala de aula da educação pública. O seu objetivo é investigar o potencial de reuso de Objetos de Aprendizagem destinados ao estudo do meio ambiente numa abordagem crítica, atentando-se para a ocorrência da prática do racismo ambiental. Nesse sentido, buscou-se compreender os fundamentos que levaram a educação ambiental como um tema a ser abordado na educação brasileira, refletindo acerca da educação ambiental no cenário pós-moderno e sua especificidade no trato de questões que atingem a maioria da população negra brasileira. Segue-se a identificação de objetos de aprendizagem disponíveis para o estudo do meio ambiente, para que seja viável apontar as características do objeto de aprendizagem em que o potencial de reuso seja satisfatório e atenda a questões relacionadas com processos de ensino e aprendizagem, dos quais participe a população negra. A pesquisa caracteriza-se como aplicada, qualitativa e exploratória. O procedimento técnico aplicado foi o da análise de conteúdo. Como lócus, foi eleito o Banco Internacional de Objetos Educacionais (BIOE) como campo de pesquisa de Objetos de Aprendizagem (OA) voltados para o estudo do meio ambiente. Concluiu-se que a perspectiva de estudo crítico do meio ambiente pode ser atingida com a utilização de OA com maior grau de reuso, nos quais se busque, através do seu conteúdo, favorecer a abordagem de questões específicas, como o racismo ambiental.

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