Each year, the Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership will award several mini-grants for curricular development, community co-instruction, and community-engaged research. We are pleased to announce the 2025-26 recipients. Look for a call for the 2026-27 mini-grants in our spring semester newsletter, and please reach out to Erica Crowley with any questions.
Curricular Development Grants
These awards support faculty in developing new or significantly revised courses that focus on environmental justice and incorporate humanities approaches or methodologies. The recipients of these awards are:
Emily Brown, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Studies
Course Title: Roman Nature and Environment
Course Summary: This course will analyze approaches to nature, ecology, and the environment within the cultural contexts of ancient Rome. Students will explore how such approaches were used as instruments of imperial power to justify the exploitation of the environment and of disenfranchised populations.
Relation to Research/Pedagogical Interests: This course touches on my interest in environmental humanities and the art and literature of the ancient world, particularly in exploring how dichotomies between “nature” and “culture” were defined and deployed in ancient art and literature.
Anna Terwiel, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Course Title: Talking Trash
Course Summary: This seminar will examine how we come to think of objects as trash, and what happens to such items after we put them in the garbage. We will also consider how the concept of “environmental justice” might help us think critically about disposability and ground a more sustainable approach to our environment.
Relation to Research/Pedagogical Interests: As a political theorist, I often teach and write about the meaning of justice, whether in the context of harmful conduct and punishment or in the context of pollution and other threats to health and well-being.
Rosario Hubert, Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of Language and Culture Studies
Course Title: HISP 338. Travel and Exploration at the End of the World (Fall 2025)
Course Summary: This course dives into the history, fictions, and archives of the Polar South, particularly the overlooked Latin American initiatives to explore and lay sovereign claims on these “faraway” lands which—paradoxically—lie right next to South America. Topics covered include the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the evolution of polar travel technology, extractivism and the whaling industry, ethnography, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding the desire for human settlement in a unique continent with no Indigenous population.
Relation to Research/Pedagogical Interests: The seminar questions the uses of Indigenous and animal practices in the exploration of uninhabited territories as well as in the aesthetic portrayal of such ventures.
Mushahid Hussein, Visiting Assistant Professor of Urban Studies
Course Title: Commodifying Socio-Natures: Environmental Justice for the Anthropocene
Course Summary:
This course explores issues of environmental justice through critical engagements with post-humanist, new materialist, and urban political ecological frameworks broadly within the environmental humanities. It centers on the global circulation of goods and non-human objects in understanding ecological transformations and their uneven consequences on urban communities around the world, both historically and in contemporary contexts. The objective is to equip students with a working knowledge of key issues informing both policy and environmental and climate justice movements, as well as encourage further research on these issues.
Relation to Research/Pedagogical Interests: The idea for this course emerged from my research on the urban political ecological consequences of enclosing wetlands and the making of real estate markets on the eastern outskirts of Dhaka City (Bangladesh), as the region is currently being incorporated within new circuits of commodification and planetary urbanization. It is also informed by my theoretical and pedagogical interests in putting urban political ecology in critical conversation with broader debates on de-growth and eco-socialism, new materialist ontologies, eco-feminism, and issues of just (energy) transitions.
Community Co-Instruction Grants
These awards support the Trinity faculty member and community partner to co-teach a class related to environmental justice.
Derin Atalay, Director, Liberal Arts Action Lab and Lecturer in Public Policy & Law
Course Title: Environmental Justice and Tenant Power: Housing Histories in Hartford (Fall 2025)
Course Summary: This course explores the history of tenant organizing in Hartford, Connecticut through the lens of environmental justice, examining how grassroots movements have challenged housing-related environmental and social inequities. In collaboration with community partners—the Connecticut Fair Housing Center and the Connecticut Tenants Union—students will conduct archival research and oral history collection to document tenant-led resistance and inform current advocacy efforts for safe, equitable housing.
Relation to Research/Pedagogical Interests: This project aligns with my commitment to community-engaged scholarship that highlights how tenant organizing addresses intertwined social and environmental injustices, helping students critically explore the roots of urban inequality through an environmental justice lens.
Catina Bacote, Associate Professor of English
Course Title: Creative Writing in the Community (Spring 2026)
Course Summary: This course will explore the Hartford arts scene, engage with local writers, and participate in literary events at locations such as Real Art Ways, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, The 224 EcoSpace, Park Street Library, and the Riverbend Bookstore. Students will investigate how imaginative writing and environmental justice in Hartford intersect. They will also learn about environmental justice work in Hartford and how Black and brown communities access necessities such as clean air, green space and shade, and safe water.
Relation to Research/Pedagogical Interests: This project will further my pedagogical interests that are geared toward social justice as I encourage students to consider the choices available to them as global actors and writers. In my creative writing and literature courses, I invite students to investigate their deepest concerns and curiosities and bear witness to timely and urgent events. They use their moral imaginations to engage with the world around them and grapple with what it means to have an ethical basis for their art.
Community Engaged Faculty Research Grant
This award supports faculty conducting community-engaged environmental research.
Stefanie Chambers, John R. Reitemeyer Term Professor of Political Science
Title: Environmental Justice Policy: Race, Place, and Power
Building on Professor Chamber’s earlier research on Hartford environmental justice coalitions, she will engage Students in the Political Science seminar Environmental Justice Policy: Race, Place, and Power in community-engaged research that examines how residents of Greater Hartford respond to and engage with a pop-up exhibit on the history and present of environmental injustice in Hartford. Students will actively contribute to the Mellon-funded initiative by taking the pop-up exhibits created by Professor Amanda Guzmán’s students into the community to collect feedback—creating an important feedback loop between academic research and community perspectives. Partners in this research include the Center for Leadership and Justice, faith-based institutions, and public libraries in urban and suburban settings.
