From Thursday April 28 through Friday April 29th, the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Academic Initiative will host the event "Environmental Justice Forum" featuring speakers and panel discussions centered around the theme of Racial Environmental Justice.

The first speaker of the forum is by Dr. Juan De Lara for his talk, "Precarious Ecologies: Chicana/o and Latinx Studies in a Moment of Environmental Crisis." This talk is hosted by the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department.

Dr. De Lara is the Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He studies urban political economy, racialization, and the politics of space, as well as the use of data science and technology to reorganize how various state agencies are restructuring the social relations of race, immigration, and labor. A third set of projects focus on teh public-facing research that support community-based organizations in their efforts to resolve social disparities. His book, Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Inland Southern Ccalifornia, uses logistics and commodity chains to unpack the black box of globalization by showing how the scientific management of bodies, space, and time produced new racialized labor regimes that facilitated a more complex and extended system of global production, distribution, and consumption.

The Environmental Justice Forum is sponsored by the following departments: 

Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor
Bren School of Environmental Science & Management
Chicana and Chicano Studies
Environmental Studies
Statistics and Applied Probability
Chicano Studies Institute