Individuals
Dr. Bhavnani's documentary film "Nothing like Chocolate," offers a glimpse into the global chocolate industry, where there are allegations that enslaved children are used to harvest beans in Ivory Coast, which produces 40% of the world's cacao. "Nothing Like Chocolate" focuses on the Grenada Chocolate Company founded by Mott Green, as well as on an independent farmer, Nelice Stewart, who grows organic cocoa beans. Green (deceased June 2013) created a worker-owned cooperative which brings profits back to the working shareholders, who include the farmers and all factory workers at the company. The film discusses how solar power and ethical technology can create a sustainable, community-based business, and, therefore, can undermine global unethical practices.
Women Culture and Development
Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, California, Santa Barbara. An architect and architectural historian, she is the author of Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023), Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012), Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005), and the co-editor with Jeremy White Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2019), and City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge, 2014). She is currently working on two projects on river landscapes: a Ganges River project funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, and Riverine: A Multispecies Approach to Decolonizing Landscapes funded by Dumbarton Oaks. She is a founding editor of PLATFORM.
National Science Foundation
American Institute of Indian Studies
Professor Cook's current research explores early modern writing about forests and trees, considering the shifting and sometimes colliding concepts of value and the history of Environmental ethics. In her current project, "Talking Trees in Long 18th-Century British Literature," she examines the simultaneous development of silviculture and silviphilia -- often radically opposed ways of valuing trees that are still with us today -- during the eighteenth century. Her work argues that this history of contradictory attitudes toward the Environment can help us understand how we respond to and address critical Environmental issues today.
The Environmental Humanities Initiative (UCSB)
The Literature & Environment Research Cluster
The Early Modern Center Research Cluster
Dr. Donelan conducts research into pedagogical issues related to sustainability, including remote teaching. In addition, he has recently begun a project to examine the relationship between Research I universities and their communities through community writing, with a particular focus on how this relationship affects local economies and local sustainability initiatives.
Dr. Colin Gardner's current research explores the ways in which dissolving the Kantian dialectic structure between man, art, and world in favor of an anti-speciesist structure of assemblage, connectivity, and relationality between aesthetics, creativity, and machinic subjectivity can produce a new vision for a more ethical and ecologically sustainable world. His work brings together issues of accountability, affect, and ecosophy as revolutions through all media, focusing specifically on art, film, installation, and text, thereby opening the human to more ethical relations with the world. He is currently co-editing an anthology for Bloomsbury entitled "Ecosophical Aesthetics" which is due in 2018.
Adjunct Faculty San Diego State University
Dr. Graves’ research interests include public history, California history, Environmental history, and U.S. history. He specializes in federal water resources development and resource allocation. He also conducts Environmental and historical investigations of industrial sites in the partnership Graves & Neushul Historical Consultants. His publications include Pursuing Excellence in Water Planning and Policy Analysis: A History of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Institute for Water Resources; From These Beginnings: A Biographical Approach to American History; and "The Rhetoric of Opposition: Anti-conservation and the Early Forest Reserves," in Journal of the West.
Carsey-Wolf Center
Doctor Hajjar's scholarship focuses on international law, war and conflict, human rights, torture, and targeted killing. She is the author of Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005), Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge, 2013), and The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022). She is a co-editor of Jadaliyya, and co-chair of the editorial committees of Middle East Report. She is working on a new book: TGenealogies of Human Rights in the Arab World which is co-authored by Omar Dewachi.
Professor Hanrahan is the founder and lead producer of Earth Media Lab, an organization that provides professional film production training with the goal of communicating Environmental problems such as climate change, pollution, and resource issues. He is a filmmaker and has produced films for clients such as National Geographic, The Nature Conservancy, and NOAA. Hanrahan collaborated on a series of short films documenting the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its biological impact in the Gulf of Mexico. He worked on another film documenting restoration work on Santa Cruz Island.
Carsey-Wolf Center
Earth Media Lab
Ken Hiltner is a professor of English literature and Environmental Studies. He explores the history of literature and the relationship between literary history and our Earth in order to better understand how we arrived at our current Environmental beliefs. Hiltner is active in examining Environmental issues from various perspectives. He hosts a weekly podcast, the Environmental Humanities Podcast, where he conducts interviews with scholars and artists to discuss how Environmental issues are taken up across the humanities. He also has given various talks, such as "Nature: How Much Does it Matter," "The Role of Our Past In Our Environmental Future," and "Environmental Criticism: What is at Stake?"
Chris Jenkins is the Head of Production in the Department of Film and Media Studies and an independent filmmaker who specializes in international documentary productions about Environmental, humanitarian, or cultural topics. He has been behind the lens of several feature length documentaries including Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, The Matador and Riverwebs. Riverwebs explores the work of stream ecologists who seek to understand the complex connections between streams and their riparian ecosystems. His most recent short film, called Lost Crops, follows a doctor and a botanist/humanitarian on a worldwide search for sustainable superfoods. Jenkins has also worked as the Director of Media for the Tropical Forest Group and the ParisAgreement.org, a website/media platform which provided up-to-the-minute information during the climate negotiations at the Paris Agreement (COP21).
Jevbratt is a professor in the art department. Her research and art is investigating humans’ relationship with non-human animals and the natural environment. She has been developing software that simulates how animals see, and she teaches classes in interspecies collaboration in the art department. She is currently leading a fiber arts project mapping invasive species on the Channel Islands, investigating invasive species ecology, and larger issues of conservation and belonging. The project is giving its audience-participants hands on experience with historical methods of textile production, and raises questions about the sustainability of our current textile industry. Her work and teaching is continuously engaged with questions about sustainability through examining the relationships we create with other species and our shared environment.
Carsey-Wolf Center
Dr. Mulfinger's art project at the Pasadena YWCA building exemplifies how art and sustainability go hand in hand. Mulfinger's installation, “Autonomy Is No Longer Possible or Interesting,” features repurposed excercise bicycles that power LED lights in the buildings when used by visitors. By repurposing materials for her artwork, Mulfinger uses sustainable methods to create metaphors that enhance cultural/community awareness.
Professor Peljhan's research focuses on the relationship between arts, sciences and engineering and works globally. His recent projects involve the Makrolab, a multi year awarded project that focuses on telecommunications, migrations, and weather systems research at the intersection of art and science from 1997-2007, and since 2008 he has been coordinating the Arctic Perspective Initiative art/science/tactical media project which is focused on the global significance of the Arctic geopolitical, natural, and cultural spheres. Through his and his Systemics lab partnership in the non-profit institute Projekt Atol he has in the past 10 years led and contributed to a series of European Union co-funded collaborative art, environment and technology research initiatives such as Changing Weathers (coordinating), Green (partner), Feral labs (coordinating), Rewilding Cultures (coordinating). As part of these projects, he helped setup the yearly and ongoing PIF CAMP research residency in the Slovenian Alps for UCSB students. In 2020 his 10 year collaborative effort to design and launch a major capability remote-sensing 2m GSD microsatellite NEMO-HD has succeeded and is now in orbit and in 2022 he has established a mobile remote-sensing art/science research lab SPEKTR-Z that among others contributed the principal charting of the largest forest wildfires in Slovenia that same year. From 2024 to 2026 he is leading a European Capital of Culture major research initiative ISOLABS, that is focused on remote/sensing and digital twin modeling of the 138km long Alpine/Mediterranean Soca/Isonzo river system. Currently, his Systemics lab is also involved in a project for the development of low cost underwater sensing swarm robots for environmental research in littoral zones.
Carsey-Wolf Center
Dr. Propen's research interests include visual and material rhetorics, Environmental and sustainability rhetorics, digital and posthuman rhetorics, rhetoric and technical communication as advocacy work, writing in the disciplines, classical and contemporary rhetorical theory, animal studies, human geography, critical cartographies, and critical GIS.
Dr. Rappaport's research considers the history of mass consumer society, with a particular focus on how large-scale businesses accrue cultural and political power. While her work inititially focused on mass-retailing and the urban Environment, her current project, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2017), examines the relationship between the global mass consumption and production of tea on agricultural labor, societies and Environments in India, South and Southeast Asia and Africa. Her book examines tea's global history from three interconnected perspectives and she argues that tea was one of the first agricultural industries to use imperial power and resources to engage in and pay for consumer and trade advertising and political lobbying in many locations over a long period of time. The model that tea developed is still used today and is critical to understanding the role of politics and publicity in shaping the geographies, power dynamics and problems in the modern global economy.
Dr. Walker researches and teaches in the areas of documentary film, trauma and memory, and Environmental media with a concentration on climate justice. Her co-edited volume, Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (Routledge 2016, with Nicole Starosielski), is among her scholarly publications that study films and videos about Environmental topics and media infrastructures in the built Environment. Walker was one of five UCSB faculty convenors of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective (2017-2019) and serves as co-editor of the University Press open access journal Media+Environment (mediaEnviron.org).
Environmental Media Initiative Research Group
California Council for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
American Council of Learned Societies
Professor Yasuda's teaching and art practice focus on the creative repurposing of materials and technologies. Her past projects, in collaboration with her spatial art students, have undertaken the repurposing of used shipping containers into 'mobile art spaces,' as well as a storefront redesign of the former Isla Vista Bakery. More recently, she has initiated partnerships with social design non-profits, Architect for Humanity and Bamboo DNA, in order to develop and test alternative uses for construction. Studying the traditional methods of local indigenous populations, her students explore bamboo, clay, and straw bale building techniques as both art and architecture. Professor Yasuda continues to develop innovative curricula in the spatial studies area of the Department of Art and was recently awarded a UCSB Leaf Grant for her classroom teaching experiments.