Environmental Justice: From Social Movement to a Scientific/Intellectual Movement

Gregory Hooks, McMaster University
Julian Torelli, McMaster University
Scott Frickel, Brown University

This research examines the emergence of “environmental justice” in academic discourse and the manner in which this discourse changed over time.   Taking advantage of a large and comprehensive corpus of articles (more than 1,000,000 articles [full-text] provided by JSTOR), we provide an empirically rich assessment of the emergence of the term “environmental justice” – first in non-indexed journals (early 1990s) and subsequently appearing in prominent indexed journals across the social sciences and environmental studies.  We mobilize natural language processing techniques to analyze the pattern of topics found in these articles over time and across disciplines.  The concept of “environmental justice” emerged from social movements operating outside the academy and outside government offices.  It is a marker of success that this social movement succeeded in institutionalizing environmental justice in the state and the academy.  One consequence of this success is that the themes emphasized in research articles shifted with this institutionalization.  Over time, research articles placed less emphasis on race, class and communities while placing greater emphasis on government agencies, policies, and identity politics.  On the one hand, the diffusion and institutionalization of “environmental justice” in the academic literature (and the state) is a clear and notable success for a grassroots social movement.  At the same time, our examination of the changing patterns of topics in research articles discussing “environmental justice” highlights ways in which the central emphases of grassroots activists received less attention as the priorities of academic researchers and policy-makers became more prominent. 

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 13. Environment, Justice, and Land