The (Un)Restricted Knowledge Speaker Series: Climate Knowledge Under Threat

US-based researchers have faced increasing restrictions on their ability to conduct and present research on the United States. The Trump administration has frozen, blocked, or cut billions of dollars in federal  grants that supported research in the social sciences, natural sciences, and the humanities. Several universities and their supporters have stated that this suspension of funding, along with other policies seeking to restrict DEI programs and student admission criteria, will restrict the scope and the nature of the research that they can conduct.

 

The Centre for the Study of the United States launched “The (Un)Restricted Knowledge Speaker Series” to highlight the research conducted by CSUS affiliates and the larger community of scholars that study the United States at the University of Toronto on topics that have become increasingly difficult for U.S. based researchers to discuss.

 

Donald Trump has sought to significantly transform US climate and environment policy through cutting back environmental regulations, expanding fossil fuel use, limiting climate-related research, and withdrawing the US from international efforts to reduce climate change. The Guardian and ProPublica have estimated that fully enacting Trump’s climate agenda could result in 1.3 million more deaths annually across the globe, with deaths primarily occurring outside the United States.  

 

The third panel of our series, “Climate Knowledge Under Threat,” featured University of Toronto scholars whose work approaches climate and environment from different disciplinary perspectives. Together, their research demonstrates how understanding this subject requires examining the intersections of media power, historical inequities, and ongoing struggles for environmental justice.

 

Panelists:

 

Hanna Morris (School of the Environment):  

Dr. Hanna E. Morris is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto with expertise in climate change media and critical methods of cultural analysis. Her research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores questions of power, identity-formation, and meaning-making around climate change. She is the co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) and an appointed member of the Board of Directors for the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA).

 

Frances O’Shaughnessy (they/them) is a historian of slavery and empire, specializing in nineteenth-century African American histories of gender, disability, and the environment. Their book manuscript, Black Revolution on the Sea Islands, historicizes Gullah Geechee people's practices of freedom, kinship, and care during the US Civil War and Reconstruction.

 

Lauren Richter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with appointments in the Department of Sociology graduate program and School of the Environment at the University of Toronto St. George. Broadly, she studies the corporate form, social inequality, health, and the environment. She uses interviews, ethnography, and archives to examine scientific controversies and the manufacture of doubt. Currently, she studies patterns of corporate discretion and impunity regarding the production of “forever” chemicals over the past six decades. Her research and teaching are shaped by critical race theory, environmental justice, science and technology studies, and environmental sociology.

 

Doug Jones is a lecturer in History and American Studies. He researches and writes on global histories of race, the environment, and technology in North America and Southern Africa. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and was previously a visiting fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a Mellon fellow in Environmental Humanities.