Environmental & Social Justice

Fellow

Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz

2020 Fellow
Luis Alexis Rodríguez Cruz is an interdisciplinary social scientist and writer based in Juana Díaz, Puerto Rico. His participatory and applied work explores the social dimensions of food systems, in relation to climate adaptation and public health outcomes, in the context of disasters and natural hazards.
Fellow

Kristin Dobbin

2020 Fellow
Kristin (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Cooperative Extension in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley focused on water justice policy and planning in California.
Fellow

Idalmis Vaquero

2020 Fellow
Idalmis is a third-year law student at UCLA School of Law, where she is enrolled in the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. She began advocating on environmental justice issues in her community of East Los Angeles...
Fellow

Ashley Stewart

2020 Fellow
Ashley Stewart received a Master of Environmental Science at Yale University’s School of the Environment. Ten years of experience as an environmental engineer and project manager has informed her expertise across the gamut of water...
Fellow

Evelyn Valdez-Ward

2020 Fellow
Evelyn (she/ella) is a sixth year, formerly undocumented, PhD candidate, Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Switzer Foundation Fellow studying the effects of drought on plants and soil microbes. Her final dissertation chapters aim to study...
Fellow

Demi Espinoza

2020 Fellow
Demi Espinoza (she/they) is the daughter of working class Mexican immigrants and the youngest of ten siblings raised in Riverside, California. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology at California State University San Bernardino and a...
Fellow

Camila Bustos

2020 Fellow
Camila Bustos is an Assistant Professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Prior to joining Pace, Professor Bustos was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Trinity College and a Clinical Supervisor in human...
Fellow Story

Lessons in zealous advocacy

Part of the value of clinic participation is learning how to advocate for a real-life client, as opposed to the hypothetical clients law students deal with in their legal writing courses. But often, clients deviate significantly from our expectations, writes Fellow Candice Youngblood. And while classes on discrimination get us fired up to champion for justice, they cannot flesh out every way justice can manifest for real-life communities.
February 24, 2020
Fellow Story

Put Your Money Where Their Mouth Is: Actualizing Environmental Justice by Amplifying Community Voices

Fellow Candice Youngblood published a Note in UC Berkeley's Ecology Law Quarterly journal that seeks to paint a picture of what working toward environmental justice should look like.
February 16, 2020
Fellow Story

Racist housing practices from the 1930s linked to hotter neighborhoods today

In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you'd do to measure human health: Check its temperature. That's what a group of researchers did, and they found that neighborhoods with higher temperatures were often the same ones subjected to discriminatory, race-based housing practices nearly a century ago.
February 9, 2020