ACEJ Team at the Spring 2026 American Cultures Enviromental Justice Fellowship Inaugural Event
About the Fellowship
Representing a wide variety of departments, fellows connected classroom learning with real-world community priorities, responding to the urgency of the climate crisis. Advancing the campus' efforts to formalize environmental justice education, they supported more collaborative and inclusive teaching and research practices, and contributed to partnerships designed to extend beyond a single semester.
Culmination Event
To mark the end of the Spring 2026 fellowship, the American Cultures Environmental Justice (ACEJ) Initiative held a Spring Celebration. The afternoon featured a fellowship poster symposium, a vegetarian lunch, and a panel of student and community organizers. By the end, participants — including student fellows, audience members, and staff — left with a deeper appreciation of environmental justice and its far reaching implications, across disciplines, communities, and struggles.
Gathered in the Latinx Research Center, the ACEJ undergraduate fellows presented their project posters, summarizing the semester of EJ community engagement. All 12 fellows worked on a range of exciting projects, from creating a new digital mapping layer with Canticle Farm in Fruitvale, Oakland; to supporting research for a Just Transition synthesis report for Richmond officials developed in coalition; to fostering intergenerational knowledge-sharing on Japanese American incarceration and its environmental and cultural dimensions.
ACEJ & Canticle Farm: Imagining a Contemporary Layer of Healing
Researcher: Antonio Pacheco | Faculty Partner: Seth Lunine
This project developed a new “layer” of the digital mapping platform, which will address contemporary environmental justice projects and activism emanating from Canticle Farm, that includes creating a cosmology map in collaboration with other students, and a series of interviews with Robert Symens-Bucher that will also be shared on the digital platform.
In collaboration with Geography 50AC: California and Geography 72AC: The Bay Area
The Concealment Imperative Goes Green
Researcher: Chloe Salloux| Faculty Partner: Victoria Robinson
This project works on identifying how sustainable 'green' menstrual narratives can mask the conditions that make menstruation inaccessible amongst UC Berkeley students. Using a student questionnaire, the project sought to determine the true barriers to more sustainable menstrual product consumption. In its final conclusions, the project notes that despite individual's environmental awareness and desire to use more eco-friendly alternatives, ‘sustainable’ menstruation is a structural question of access, infrastructure, and corporate accountability.
The History of Redlining, Environmental Justice and Health in Berkeley, CA
Researcher: Aimee Dhonte | Faculty Partner: Erika Weissinger
This project supports local reparations efforts in Berkeley, connected to the Alameda County Reparations Commission, with a focus on elevating perspectives on historical harm, current inequities, environmental justice and visions for repair. The project builds on ongoing research about environmental disparities in Berkeley, including how redlining, toxic infrastructure, heat exposure, transit barriers, and health disparities have shaped conditions for students in West Berkeley.
Models for Liberatory, Land-Based Education & Building Networks for Solidarity and Knowledge-Sharing
Researcher: Lora Chang | Faculty Partner: Michael Mascarenhas
This project supports Remagination Farm, a community farm and healing space that uses land-based learning to teach people how to care for the earth and people, build relationships, and support individual and collective healing. During the spring, the project helps prepare the farm, farmhouse, and healing house as places for healing and community care.
Arts, Crafts, and Environmental Justice
Researcher: Nevada Coy | Faculty Partner: Jun Sunseri
This project teaches people about the history and significance of paper flower-making within Japanese American incarceration, showing how creativity, memory, cultural resilience, and environmental relationships are connected. It uses a hand-illustrated digital platform, lesson plans, and multimedia storytelling to help students and community members better understand history, place, resilience and relationships with nature.
Review full project poster here.
In collaboration with Anthropology 2AC: Introduction to Anthropology
Data from Below: A Participatory Approach to Community-Centered Data
Researcher: Oluwatunmise Akanle | Faculty Partner: Cathryn Carson
This project explores a “data from below” approach to data collection, in which the people most affected by an EJ issue lead in producing, interpreting, and managing the data about it. Rather than being passive subjects, community members shape what is collected, how it is understood, and how it is used.
Review the full project poster here.
In collaboration with Data C104: Human Contexts and Ethics of Data
A Love Letter to Richmond: Our Future Economy
Researcher: Kiyomi James | Faculty Partner: Eli Moore
The project supports Just Transition work in Richmond by helping community organizations build the capacity, resources, and partnerships they need to lead change. It works with local partners so marginalized communities can have more power in shaping policies, systems, and places that affect their wellbeing and sense of belonging.
Sanctuary & Sovereignty: Models and Modes of Abolitionist Praxis
Researchers: Leah Richardson & Sheraz Shriqui | Faculty Partner: Nicole Lendahl-Ruiz
This project explores the connections between abolitionist praxis, Indigenous land stewardship, and the guardianship of native bees. It examines how environmental law and the criminal legal system can regulate or criminalize decentralized stewardship practices, while asking how law might be reimagined to better protect Indigenous land-based practices, pollinator ecologies, and forms of care that resist colonial and extractive systems.
Bay Area Audio Narratives
Researcher: Jocelyn Liu | Faculty Sponsor: Lakshmi Eassey
This project supports the course “Bay Area Audio Narratives” by helping students engage with people and communities through storytelling, with focus on environmental justice. It includes developing a speaker series with practitioners working on EJ issues and exploring partnerships with groups in places like Joshua Tree and Kerala, India, so students can connect local storytelling with broader environmental justice work.
In collaboration with Geography 118: Storytelling in Place and Geography 119: Audio Narratives of the Bay Area
Evaluating Environmental and Health Concerns in Marin City
Researcher: Sofia Afzal | Faculty Partner: Cesunica Ivery
This project works on identifying and addressing key environmental and public health risks in Marin City, with a focus on local air quality monitoring efforts by installing community-based sensor networks, and conducting handheld, real-time measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) using Aeroqual sensors. This work supports the development of localized, actionable data to inform community advocacy and equitable policy solutions.
The Missing American Aircrews Project (MAAP): Lowering Impact and Improving Efficacy in DPAA Excavations
Researcher: Rory Hinkle | Faculty Partner: Jun Sunseri
This project supports the Missing American Aircrews Project (MAAP) in lowering impacts, including environmental ones, and improving efficacy in DPAA Excavations, by engaging students and community members in the development and management of a digital database or military aircraft, uniforms and life support equipment from WWII, with the idea of identifying and recovering US members who have gone missing or lost their lives during service. Also faster and more effective hazardous waste removal.
Panel Description
Coinciding with May Day, the ACEJ Spring Celebration concluded with an intriguing student panel. Soph Padua, Shreya Chaudhuri, and Alina Letica Zárate shared what brought them to EJ organizing, how they engage with it beyond the scope of the university, and how labor informs their EJ consciousness. Key themes of migration, exploitation, genocide, and social reproduction arose, with each panelist connecting these realities to their own identities and experiences. Ultimately, the panel was a reminder of how environmental justice is essential to justice work everywhere.
Panelists
Alina Leticia Zárate is a current PhD Student in the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group. Zárate’s research interests center around farmworker justice and farmworker vulnerability to climate changes in addition to environment-labor dynamics, the water-food-energy nexus, and transition to sustainable agriculture in the US.
Moderator
Amelia Pinto is the Environmental Justice Curriculum Coordinator at the American Cultures Center and a UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies and Geography student. Rooted in her experience as a facilitator, organizer, and urban farmer, Amelia is thinking through relationships with land and liberation, and the roles community-building and justice-centered praxis play in movement work.