We recognize that establishing trust and strong research partnerships takes time. Over the past three years, the EJLP has partnered 20 fellows from different community-based organizations with researchers at the UC Davis. For the 2025 EJLP, we invited former fellows to re-apply in order to continue building relationships with UC Davis researchers and advancing their research projects. This year, we are collaborating with the three EJ Leaders below. 

We’re excited to release the Environmental Justice Leaders Program (EJLP) Limited-series Podcast! In this series, we interviewed the six 2024 EJ Leaders who participated in the fellowship program.

This summer, the Feminist Research Institute hosted interns due to the generous sponsorship of the CITRIS Banatao Institute. We wanted to highlight our summer interns, namely who they are, what their final project was, what they learned from this internship, and their goals.  

Take a deep breath in. Go ahead. Now let it out… In that breath is 4 billion years of Earth's history. This was the beginning of Dr. Dawn Sumner's talk at the UCD Feminist Research Institute. Dr. Sumner is the FRI director and a geobiologist who currently conducts research about oxygen levels, cyanobacteria, and microbial mats in Antarctica. Her opening invited the audience to reflect on our interconnected relationship with geological time, one of the themes of the talk.

In this course, we will read Weathering by Arline T. Geronimus, the UC Davis Campus Community Book Project for 2024-25. Students will read the text with a feminist lens, with supplemental materials introducing perspectives from Black feminists. Goals for the class will be to frameworks, practices, and concrete actions students can take to counter injustice. We will also explore the relationship between intersectionality and justice, with attention to race, gender, disability, queerness, and nationality.

This course investigates how ecofeminism and queer theory—often inspired by indigenous and decolonial perspectives—disrupt traditional narratives surrounding nature, culture, and power. We will unsettle boundaries between dichotomies such as nature/culture, life/death, mind/body, human/non-human, matter/spirit, and within various social constructs such as race and gender. We will trace the violent effects of patriarchy, human-exceptionalism, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and modern science.

Asking Different Questions in Climate Science is a seminar for climate scientists and researchers more broadly who seek to integrate equity more deeply into their research. Participants will learn how to more deeply integrate socio-cultural factors into their work. Topics covered include how historic bias still influences current scientific practices and how to address this, conducting meaningful community-engaged research, working with tribal nations, improving modeling through deeper incorporation of equity, and other relevant areas.

The founders of the Feminist Research Institute created a brilliant vision with immense possibility. We are making good on their vision. We have something solid we can stand on that shows people what we are about. 

I was lucky that when I woke up on November 6, I caught a live stream by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I recommend watching the entire stream. Gumbs reflected on how during the first 100 days in office, a new president often engages in a display of power by pardoning people, passing laws, implementing new practices, and selecting appointees.. We can do our own version of this too.

A Student Assistant IV is sought to work for the Feminist Research Institute. The Feminist Research Institute is dedicated to changing research culture towards justice and liberation. Scientific practices remain infused with the legacies of white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy. And we seek to change this. If this mission resonates with you, please read on!