Collective for Social and Environmental Justice

Students walking with Mt.Hood in the background

CSEJ promotes human rights and conflict resolution locally, nationally and globally. We bring WSU faculty, students and community partners together to foster rigorous analysis of social, economic, racial and environmental justice issues.

Our work includes:

  • Interdisciplinary community-based research
  • Interdisciplinary curricular innovations
  • Research colloquia, conferences, workshops and public events
  • Media projects (video documentaries, websites, radio and TV programming)

CSEJ is working toward the following major goals:

  • Building research teams to collect, track and analyze data on social justice practices in community groups and governmental agencies in Southwest Washington.
  • Creating a social and environmental justice-related research and data clearinghouse that enables community groups to access research on issues of concern to them.
  • Integrating community research needs into graduate and undergraduate coursework.

CSEJ faculty affiliates

  • Stephen Bollens: Aquatic ecology
  • Kevan B. Moffett, Hydrology, Ecohydrology, and Landscape Dynamic
  • Steven Sylvester: Health effects of contaminants in drinking water
  • Judith Ann Wait: Agroecology and urban ecosystems (doctoral candidate)
  • Jerry Goodstein: Management and operations, business ethics
  • Tom Tripp: Psychology of workplace conflicts
  • Susan Finley: Educational issues associated with economic poverty and homelessness, diversity, access to education
  • Linda Mabry: Educational testing and effects on students of different income levels
  • Shameem Rakha: Racial and social injustice, cultural competence, student civic engagement
  • Katherine Rodela: Equity-oriented school and district leadership; social justice in education
  • Desiree Hellegers: Social movements, civil liberties, environmental justice, cultural and political organizing among homeless people
  • Thabiti Lewis: African American literature and African diaspora culture, popular culture and race theory
  • Meagan Lobnitz: Race, gender and identity social justice, access to education
  • Pavithra Narayanan: Economic and social policies, civil liberties, gender and globalization
  • Carol Siegel: Sexuality and gender in literature, film and contemporary music
  • Avantika Bawa: Drawings and installations that respond to the site they occupy
  • Steve Fountain: Environmental history, specifically human-animal relations, Native American rights and issues, and the interactions of people and arid landscapes
  • Laurie Mercier: U.S. post-1945 social history and the intersections of social movements with American politics, economy and foreign policy
  • Sue Peabody: The law of slavery, freedom and citizenship in France in the 17th through 19th centuries
  • Marcelo Diversi: Decolonizing scholarship, identity development in educational contexts among disenfranchised youth and families, ethnography of street youth
  • Elizabeth Soliday: Maternal-child health and pediatric health
  • Tracy Tachiera: Diversity, equity and inclusion; families in poverty; digital polarization
  • Sam Lohmann: Accessible learning materials; research practices; poetry and poetics
  • Connie Nguyen-Truong: Public/population/community health, Asian Americans, immigrants, refugees, health disparities, participatory and qualitative research
  • Mark Stephan: The interface between citizen participation, bureaucratic politics and environmental policy

  • Tahira Probst: Occupational health and safety; the effects of organizational change on employee health, safety and well-being; workplace diversity
  • Clayton Mosher: Crime and deviance, law and society, substance abuse, drug policies, criminal sentencing, racial issues in the criminal justice system

For more information email desiree.hellegers@wsu.edu