Emily Zhu - Carceral Spaces, Polluted Places: Prisons and the Distribution and Cleanup of Superfund Sites
For decades, incarcerated individuals and antiprison organizers have worked to draw attention to the intersections between mass incarceration and environmental injustice. Only recently has academic scholarship begun to follow suit to examine prisons as a site of environmental risk. In this project, I examine how the presence of prisons is related to the distribution of toxic waste sites in the EPA’s Superfund program and their remediation. Despite limited scholarship, prisons are a particularly critical site to examine questions of environmental justice, given the historical and…
Laura Veira-Ramirez - "Almost Perfect": The Cleansing and Erasure of Undocumented and Queer Identities Through Performance of Model Families and Citizenship
This thesis focuses on the way undocumented and queer people have to present their identities in a very clean way in their fight for security by looking at differing timelines of gay liberation and immigrant rights as well as binational same-sex couple advocacy and the case of Shirley Tan.
Queer people appeal to rights by positioning themselves as U.S. citizens who should have access to them…