Challenging the white spaces of environmental sociology

In 2015, Dorceta Taylor received the Fred Buttel Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Environmental Sociology Award at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA). At a business meeting that year, Dr. Taylor observed that the ASA Section on Environmental Sociology has remained as white as it was when she first became a member decades ago (Wilder et al. 2019). The following year, the section council placed the topic of ‘diversity’ on the business meeting agenda – but time ran short and the meeting was adjourned without any discussion. In response to the fact that these concerns had been repeatedly raised but not adequately addressed, four of the authors of this essay formed an ad hoc Committee on Racial Equity (CRE). In its first year, the CRE tasked itself with investigating racial and ethnic diversity within the section, assessing the professional climate for scholars of color, and recommending changes in section policies and practices. Our research revealed that although U.S. sociology is more racially diverse than it was in the early 2000s, this pattern does not hold for environmental sociology. In spite of growing overall membership in recent years, the ASA Section on Environmental Sociology has actually lost graduate student and faculty members of color over the last decade (Mascarenhas et al. 2017a). Additionally, we found that among our majority-white survey respondents, there seemed to be little knowledge about the working and learning conditions of faculty and students of color in the section (Mascarenhas et al. 2017b). Moreover, while many white section members expressed support for the work of the CRE, some explicitly or implicitly placed the responsibility on scholars and students of color to insert themselves into the field rather than putting the onus on the field to provide an environment and scholarly community that are more welcoming (Mascarenhas et al. 2017b). We concluded that U.S. environmental sociology remains constituted by multiple forms of ‘white space’ (Mascarenhas et al. 2017a); that is, spaces characterized by the overwhelming presence of whites in everyday interactions and positions of authority, which formally and informally act as barriers to inclusion and belonging for people of color (Anderson 2015). White space can also produce and reproduce ‘tastes, perceptions, feelings, and emotions’ (Bonilla-Silva 2014, 104) on racial dynamics that protect and promote white interests (Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006). It is clear to the CRE that U.S. environmental sociology being theorized, taught, and experienced as a white space is a phenomenon worthy of our collective scrutiny, as white institutional spaces are not accidental, and they carry epistemic implications (Moore 2007; Murphy 2021).