Just Sustainability, Episode 12C: Cathy Jordan – Listening and rethinking the deficit-focused approach to environmental justice

In the final part of our conversation, Cathy Jordan and I talk about the emphasis on addressing disparities and harms within much of the literature about environmental justice. Cathy suggests that those of us who work on environmental justice need for to be more aspirational and be better at envisioning a more utopic future. Cathy also tells me about the skills that she believes everybody should practice to be better listeners.

Cathy Jordan is a pediatric neuropsychologist that teaches at the University of Minnesota Medical School. She’s also the Associate Director for Leadership & Education at the Institute on the Environment and the Consulting Director of Research for the Children and Nature Network. While Cathy’s work is always informed by the principle that research should robustly include the communities that it’s about, her scholarship has — at different times — focused on a range of topics. These topics include: the impacts of lead exposure on children, methods within community-based participatory research, and the effect of exposure to nature on wellness and learning.

Links: http://environment.umn.edu/staff/cathy-jordan/ https://www.childrenandnature.org/ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00766/full