The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Transforming Participatory Science into Socioecological Praxis,” comes from Volume 5 (2014). Brian J. Burke and Nik Heynen evaluate the participatory traditions of citizen science and sustainability science, finding that they often fall short of the transformative potential because they do not directly confront the production of environmental injustice and political exclusion.
Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.
BRIAN J. BURKE is an assistant professor in the Goodnight Family Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University. From 2012 to 2014 he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Coweeta Listening Project. His research aims to support movements for social justice and environmental sustainability by examining their ethical visions and strategies and the challenges they face. Drawing on political economy and political ecology, he studies how material and sociocultural forces shape processes of social and socionatural change in specific contexts. His work has included projects on urban environmental activism on the US-Mexico border, rural cooperatives in Latin America, alternative economies in Colombia, and environmental knowledge.
NIK HEYNEN is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia and director of the Coweeta Listening Project. His research utilizes a combined urban political ecology/urban political economy framework to investigate how economic, political, and cultural processes contribute to the production of material inequality and uneven urban environments. His three main research foci relate to the analysis of how social power relationships, including class, race, and gender, are inscribed in the transformation of nature, and how in turn these processes contribute to interrelated and interdependent connections between nature, space, and social reproduction.
