Lexington Books
Pages: 126
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-4985-0784-4 • Hardback • December 2017 • $104.00 • (£80.00)
978-1-4985-0785-1 • eBook • December 2017 • $98.50 • (£76.00)
Damayanti Banerjee is research faculty affiliate at Colorado State University.
Section I: Locating Environmental Justice in Rural Places
Introduction
Section II: Theorizing the “Justice” in Environmental Justice
1. An Integrative Framework for Environmental Justice
Section III: Researcher Statement
2. The Narrative Moment: Informing Environmental Claims through Ethnographic Analysis
Section IV: Just Places: A Story of Cultural and Environmental Injustice in Land Between the Rivers
3. Cultural and Environmental History of Settlement: 1779 – 1945
4. Development Projects and Displacement Narratives: 1945-present
Section V: Contextualizing the Environmental Justice Movement in Land Between the Rivers
5. Exploring Strategies of Justice in Community Mobilization: The Case of Land Between the Rivers
Section VI: Towards an Integrative Framework for Environmental Justice
Concluding Remarks
Conceptualizing Environmental Justice was a pleasure to read. Academically rigorous and yet accessible—Banerjee is a great storyteller—the text taught me a great deal, from how we think about justice to why we cannot afford to give up the fight for it, in all its forms and with as many strategies as possible at our disposal.
— Michael S. Carolan, Colorado State University
This is an important contribution to understanding the array of environmental injustices and how different approaches are mobilized at different stages of displacement and dispossession, particularly in the construction of dams. Banerjee integrates different approaches to environmental justice to strategies of communities in environmental conflicts with powerful actors. She does a masterful job of linking strategic choices of community mobilization to the local and more global interests in justice in general and specifically environmental justice. Thus she shows how denial of cultural voice can become a part of the environmental justice movement, legitimizing local definitions of the situation when confronted with ‘science’ that presumes to be acting in some kind of greater public good. The ethnographic method and the reflexive approach to the place and its people gives a reader a lived sense of the community’s continuing search for justice in the face of its multiple losses of place and identity.
— Cornelia Flora, Iowa State University
Damayanti Banerjee has produced a work of great significance. With keen theoretical insight and powerful ethnographic detail, she demonstrates that communities articulate and define environmental justice in far broader terms than most scholars have considered or imagined. This book is also remarkable as a study of environmental justice movements in rural America—a spectrum of spaces and cultural contexts that have received insufficient attention in the field. Banerjee brings together skillful analysis with painstakingly gathered data that culminate in a study that fills me with hope for the future of environmental justice scholarship and movements.
— David Naguib Pellow, University of California, Santa Barbara