Contested Knowledges in Environmental Assessment

This side of my work focuses my long-term interest in the formation, solidification, and perpetuation of environmental injustice through a series of projects on contested environmental knowledge in state resource management. In two papers in this area (see Tollefson and Panikkar, 2020; Panikkar and Tollefson, 2018), I investigate how the governance of extractive development in the US Arctic precludes possibilities for the equitable inclusion of Native Alaskan communities in formal, state-led processes of environmental knowledge production and adjudication – and how coalitions of community activists and expert consultants make alternative environmental knowledge claims to the state and in public arenas.