Meet FRI's Summer 2025 Environmental Justice Scholars
This summer, the Feminist Research Institute hosted four Environmental Justice Scholars, who have been co-supported by the Institute of the Environment and the Graduate Program of Environmental Policy & Management. Here, we highlight these students, specifically their goals, their final project, and what they learned.
What was your final project about? For my practicum, I worked with America Walks, a national nonprofit dedicated to creating walkable and equitable communities, on the project “Incentivizing Low-Emission Transportation Alternatives.” Over three months, I researched how transit incentives, such as fare-free programs and tax credits, can reduce car dependency and promote more equitable, low-emission transportation by reviewing national and international case studies. In addition to it, I analyzed interviews conducted with non-drivers, particularly rural residents, people with disabilities, non-binary individuals, and BIPOC communities, by ensuring proper data anonymization and ethical research practices. Using feminist and grounded theory within the mobility justice framework, I identified key themes around access, exclusion, and mobility challenges non-drivers experience almost on a daily basis. This will eventually contribute to an upcoming story map and user-generated storytelling hub designed to highlight non-driver experiences and inform inclusive transportation policy.
What did you learn from this project? This project taught me that stories backed by research have the power to change how we see issues and push for more just policies. I realized that mobility and transportation go far beyond the technicalities of infrastructure design; and for policies to be truly inclusive, people’s transportation stories matter just as much. Listening to non-drivers describe their daily routines—the long waits, the long walks, the careful planning, and even the harassment—made me understand how much freedom and opportunity depend on something as simple as a bus schedule. It showed me that small policy choices can deeply affect someone’s entire day, or life! Beyond learning to anonymize data ethically and analyze themes using grounded theory, I learned how powerful it is to listen actively. Stories, when treated as data, can move policy in ways numbers alone cannot. This practicum helped me see that if planning is to be truly just, it must center care, ethics, and lived experience of people and communities.
What piqued your interest in this project? What drew me to the project was its focus on community storytelling and representation. Having grown up in systems that restricted women’s mobility, whether due to gendered expectations, social restrictions, or policy blind spots, I was drawn to the project that centered on non-driver experiences and recognized mobility as a form of freedom. The idea that storytelling could shape equitable transportation policy resonated with my belief that numbers alone can’t capture the full reality of people’s lives, especially when it comes to mobility. Because to me, mobility is so much more than getting from one place to another; it’s what allows us to participate fully in society, to live, work, care, and belong. I was also inspired by how both FRI and America Walks ground advocacy in local experiences, ensuring that the communities most affected by planning decisions have a voice in shaping them.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years? As a Geographer with a Planning background who transitioned into Environmental Policy and Management with a specialization in Environmental Justice, I’ve become increasingly committed to working within and building justice-based frameworks ensuring that community-rooted knowledge shapes policymaking. In five years, I see myself working with communities disproportionately burdened by historic injustices to help develop solutions that reflect their lived realities and visions for change. Whether through a Ph.D. in Geography or a policy role, I want to keep exploring how lived experiences can inform policies in ways that are inclusive, and grounded in care. More specifically, I’m driven to bridge global knowledge with local solutions by bringing what I’ve learned here back to Bangladesh (my home country), and hope my work continues to center stories, justice, and the right to move freely, allowing me to give back to my community!
What was your final project about? My final project of my practicum was a policy brief that supported the creation of mobility action plans across all cities of California as the preliminary step towards community led and centered transportation and mobility planning that champions the principles of mobility justice.
What did you learn from this project? Borrowing from another blog where I wrote about this: This practicum reminded me that thoughtful environmental justice practice involves enormous amounts of grassroots organizing and critical thought. Through many planning meetings and check-ins with Adonia and Naomi, I learnt that progress is not just creating something to show for your time and energy, but creating something with vision, thought, the communities you are working with, because ultimately, if environmental justice work is not collaborative, does not meaningfully address systemic inequities, and does not challenge the status quo, change will be hard to both imagine and see actualized.
What piqued your interest in this project? I think the policy-making world is dynamic, fast-paced, extremely jargony, and complex. That said, a lot of critical and meaningful work happens in the world of policy. I joined the EPM program to learn the inner workings, language, and approaches of that world to be able to effectively drive change in those spaces or outside of them through grassroots advocacy. That is also what drew me to this fellowship and practicum. It gave me a chance to see how advocacy networks come to be and the thought, time, and criticality that goes into making a community of practitioners in or adjacent to the policy world who learn, work, and organize together. I finished my practicum with lots of insights that are hard to find in a classroom!
Where do you see yourself in 5 years? While I have always struggled to answer where I see myself in 5 years, that task has become so much more difficult in the last year given all the changes we are seeing in the world around us. All I can say with some degree of certainty is that I see myself happy and fulfilled, surrounded by community, working with grassroots organizations and groups, and working on shifting the tide towards justice and class consciousness. I also see myself growing food, feeding people, and building community too in various ways!