Edge Effects invited scholars from a range of fields to share with us environmental books and texts on the topic of "Race and Place" that they are most excited to teach in the new academic year.

Prison Agriculture Lab directors Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca discuss the ubiquity of carceral agriculture in the United States, its structuring logics of racial capitalism, and possibilities for abolitionist food futures.

Two elephants came to live in Miami Beach with resort guests in the 1920s, troubling the divides between humans and animals, work and play. Anna Vemer Andrzejewski examines the ambiguous role these elephants occupied in Florida's leisure landscape.

Real estate developments emulating U.S.-style master-planned communities are popular in Buenos Aires. Mara Dicenta unpacks the violence such developments enact on the environment and the community, as well as the resurgence against them.

Nancy J. Jacobs explores the thought-provoking, tragic relationship between enslaved Africans and the African grey parrot in eighteenth century European portraiture.

How do certain temperatures come to be normalized and idealized in Hawai'i? Dr. Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart shares critical insights at the intersection of Indigenous dispossession and resistance.

Liz Carlisle shares stories from her latest book, which uncovers the history of regenerative agriculture and the farmers of color who practice it.

In the final episode of the Ground Truths podcast series, Clare Sullivan, Carly Gittrich, and Ben Iuliano talk to urban agriculture leaders in Dane County, Wisconsin about how their programs serve Black communities and other communities of color.

In 2021, rates of childhood lead exposure in Milwaukee were nearly double the state average. In this episode of Ground Truths, Juniper Lewis and Carly Griffith learn more about this public health crisis.

In this written correspondence, emery jenson talks to Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles about how ableist and racist thinking along with a narrow conception of "environmentalism" have propped up the anti-vaccination movement.

Beyond "doom bros" and end-of-history narratives, Jessica Hurley's new book looks to the stories Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American writers tell about nuclear infrastructures and the radical politics of futurelessness.

"South Philly had Black history but no Black people." Sterling Johnson, with Kimberley Thomas, ‎follows a century of green gentrification along the Schuylkill River.

Political science scholar Claire Jean Kim outlines how COVID-19 came to be racialized and discusses the implications of foregrounding anti-Asian harassment and violence in an anti-Black society.

Prisoner and abolitionist Lawrence Jenkins describes the struggles of being incarcerated during COVID-19 and the heightened risk, fear, and racial violence of life on the inside.

Erik Wallenberg reviews Johanna Fernández's award-winning book on the Young Lords and connects their political project of securing garbage pickup and medical access for New Yorkers to the broader environmental justice movement.

Anika Rice and Zachary A. Goldberg show how an emerging movement is not only connecting Jewish farmers but also building solidarity for racial justice.

In her poem and photo exhibit, Les James reflects on how protest artists transformed the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia and spoke back to history.

Herbalist Asia Dorsey reflects on a pandemic year when life and death cycles were especially present and describes Yellow Dock's role as the grief worker of the plant world.

What does abolition look like? Ki’Amber Thompson discusses the need for more abolition visuals and how the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project brings outdoor healing justice to youth impacted by incarceration.

In the 1960s, environmentalists often pitted the "natural self" against "artificial" social identities like race, class, and gender. Alexander Menrisky argues that this vocabulary still obscures issues of environmental justice in the U.S. today.

Historian Paige Glotzer discusses the segregated suburbs and what the history of Baltimore's Roland Park Company has to do with today's inequality.

Ethnographer Frances Roberts-Gregory describes the importance of embracing ‘Black girl reliable’ and supporting frontline communities.

Christian Brooks Keeve traces how fugitive seeds and seed stories are deeply entangled with the stories and legacies of the Black diaspora.

Farmer and educator Kamal Bell discusses the growth of Sankofa Farms and the legacies of racism and dispossession for African American farmers.

Dr. Shona Jackson discusses labor in the Caribbean and the need for radical, collective labor histories that include Creole groups and Indigenous peoples.

Organic farming has far-right roots. While the movement has grown beyond those, its history shows why we must examine our theories of social change.

The Dole pineapple plantation has a destructive history of transforming the Hawaiian Islands. Mallory Huard describes how that continues today in the tourism industry.

A 19th-century novel about a (white) women's utopia at the center of the earth documents the long history of American eugenics and ecofascism.

Farming has been a part of Black freedom struggles for a long time. It's always been about much more than growing food.

The award-winning author and Professor Emeritus of Literature and Creative Writing discusses storytelling during environmental crisis, legacies of Japanese incarceration, and why ethnographies are environmental writing.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, and other activists and educators recommend books that challenge the divisions of life drawn by settler colonialism, racial slavery, and the natural sciences.

A "plantation-style community" might ease houselessness in Hawaiʻi. But it also erases violent histories of labor exploitation and Native dispossession. Leanne Day and Rebecca Hogue discuss Kahauiki Village and the dangers of plantation nostalgia.

Greta LaFleur’s new book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, shows how desire was produced in surprising ways alongside taxonomies of plants and racial difference in early British colonial texts.

What haunts the land? Artists R.L. Martens and Bii Robertson dig up the tangled history of "the vampire crop," slavery, and soil exhaustion in Maryland, revealing that the past is more present than you might think.

A new book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, moves beyond familiar comparisons between race and species by drawing on Black studies.

The environmental conditions of Japanese American incarceration camps in World War II were pivotal to the way detainees navigated their experience. But these histories are as diverse as their landscapes.

The Anthropocene gives a name to human-caused environmental change. The Plantationocene puts colonialism, capitalism, and enduring racial hierarchies at the center of the conversation and asks what past and future modes of resistance might emerge.

When you venture into the great unknown, you often have to rely on the generosity of strangers. Eddy Harris reflects on race and outdoor recreation, ecological conservation, and the elusive idea of America as he discusses his film, River to the Heart.

Comics and graphic novels help us picture new worlds and imagine how to save our own. Four writers recommend their favorites.

A historian planned a small study of cigarette culture. But she ended up uncovering a transnational network of seeds, plants, knowledge, and racist ideologies, and writing a book that transforms how we conceive of corporations and empire.

Du Bois, born 150 years ago, was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. But his environmental thought remains underappreciated.

Environmental justice is the future of environmental activism. A new documentary reader edited by Christopher Wells chronicles the birth of the environmental justice movement.

The Flint water crisis is not over. Anna Clark’s new book tells the history of how we got here and how lead is here to stay.

What would it mean to see through the eyes of dogs? The tangled histories of humans and animals show us how personhood, criminality, and cruelty are constructed.

An artist honors the struggles of undocumented immigrants in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands and shows the emotional and environmental toll of immigration policies.

When students critique outdoor fashion on campus, their views reveal gendered, ethnic, and regional stereotypes at play in the local meaning of international brands.

The fight against African American land loss isn't just about economic justice. It's about environmental sustainability.

A recent book shows Chicago's turn-of-the-century black and immigrant laborers embraced the great outdoors. Did they have any other choice?

The Smithsonian's fish collection preserves not just specimens but the labor and knowledge of immigrant fishermen on the California coast.

The author of "The Hamlet Fire" discusses a deadly blaze at a chicken-processing facility and the logics of cheapness which provided the kindling.

A meditation on how the annual burning of a 51-foot marionette forges connections to a city and its complex, violent past.

Charlottesville reminds us that a full reckoning with our landscapes of commemoration requires we ask not only what stories they tell, but also what stories they don't.

The author of the new book "Apollo in the Age of Aquarius" shows how NASA shaped, and was shaped by, 1960s environmentalism, feminism, conservatism, counterculture, antiwar protests, and the black freedom struggle.

Who should be allowed to brand a neighborhood? A review of Derek Hyra's new book, "Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City," examining transformations in the Shaw/U Street neighborhood of the nation's capital.

Ivy League institutions are scrambling to uncover their links to the history of slavery. But the University of Mississippi—built by slaves, amid slave plantations, for slaveowners to teach future slaveowners—might offer the richest insights into the nation's unshakable ties to centuries of bondage.

The migration of African Americans to cities and the rise of a commuter culture in the suburbs were shaped by one transformative technology: the automobile.

Four graduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison share their reflections on the work of Do Ho Suh.

For many of us, mosquitos are an annoying fact of life in the summer. But for Dawn Biehler, they are also a symptom of social inequality.

The importance of storytelling in elucidating and challenging understandings of race and the environment.

A geologist turned award-winning writer reflects on the marks racism has left on the American landscape.

A compost organization in New York City offers up an alternative vision of urban green space and waste labor.

Pursuing environmental justice requires recognizing the varied forms of racism.

A late eighteenth-century painting of a moment that never happened illuminates our complex struggles with how to “deal with” the past.

A safari trip inspires wonder at both what is found in a game park and who is not.

In the last few weeks, two grand juries declined to indict the police officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner. What can scholars in the environmental humanities and social sciences say about racialized state violence?

A visit to Jefferson Davis’s former property in Mississippi shows that, in the battles over how we remember the Civil War, the combatants are not always human.