Environmental Justice Caucus Mentoring Session

Session Submission Type: Professional Development Workshop

Abstract

For the past several years, the Environmental Justice Caucus has hosted a graduate student mentoring session at the ASA Annual Meeting during the first session time slot on Saturday mornings, directly before our caucus business meeting. The session aims to forge connections between graduate students at different institutions and between graduate students and faculty working in their fields of interest. The mentoring session provides space for both group and one-on-one graduate student mentorship. Topics include academic and nonacademic publishing, the academic job market and alt-ac career paths, postdoc and fellowship applications, and scholar-activist praxis.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Sage Gerson, Rhode Island School of Design

Panelists

• Lisa Fink, Michigan State University

• Sedonna S Goeman-Shulsky, UCLA

• Moe Gámez, University of Oregon

Biographical Information

Sage Gerson is assistant professor of literary arts and studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she also coordinates the Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies program. She is a settler scholar whose work resides at the intersections of the environmental humanities and the critical study of Western colonial modernity through a perspective informed by Native and Black Studies. You can find her research published in the journals Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), Social Text, Media+Environment, and the Cultural Studies Association’s Lateral, among other places. Sage is the chair of the ASA's Environmental Justice Caucus.

Lisa Fink is an assistant professor in Lyman Briggs College and the Department of English at Michigan State University. A settler scholar of political ecology and environmental humanities, their current book project is a critical race, ethnic, and Indigenous studies account of dominant U.S. environmental discourse, thought, and practice concerning “invasive species” read alongside anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies—and alternative forms of thought and practice that emerge in contestation. Lisa is associate chair of the ASA's Environmental Justice Caucus.

Sedonna Goeman-Shulsky is a Ph.D. Candidate at UCLA’s Institute of Environment & Society, where she works with tribal communities towards environmental justice. She conducts research in Western New York regarding fishing culture and access amongst Settler and Haudenosaunee communities. Sedonna is one of the ASA's Environmental Justice Caucus graduate liaisons.

Moe Gámez (they/them/elle) is a scholar of queer and trans latinx ecologies. Raised in Wilmington & San Pedro, California, they currently reside in Eugene, Oregon where they are a PhD candidate in English with a graduate certificate in Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic studies at the University of Oregon. Moe is one of the ASA's Environmental Justice Caucus graduate liaisons.