Each year, the Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership awards several mini-grants for curricular development, community co-instruction, and community-engaged research. We are pleased to announce the 2026-27 recipients. Look for a call for the 2027-28 mini-grants in our spring semester newsletter.
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:
Stefanie Chambers, John R. Reitemeyer Term Professor of Political Science
Course title: Environmental Justice Policy: Race, Place, and Power
“My project expands upon my earlier research on environmental justice in Hartford. This course examines environmental justice movements in the United States, with particular attention to urban and rural communities. We analyze how Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized groups navigate political systems to address environmental inequities. Students will explore the socio-historical contexts that shape environmental burdens, studying both traditional political engagement and alternative strategies employed by communities. Special emphasis is placed on Hartford through a community-based learning project, allowing students to directly engage with local environmental justice initiatives.
My students will actively contribute to the Hartford Environmental Justice Research Partnership by taking the pop-up exhibits created by Professor Amanda Guzmán’s students in fall 2026 into the community in spring 2027 to collect feedback – creating an important feedback loop between academic research and community perspectives. I look forward to collaborating with the grant co-PI team to determine the list of pop-up display dialogue venues and am committed to building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with each community partner organization we work with as part of this collaboration.”
Benjamin Pokross, Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Course Title: Race and Environment in the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century
“This course looks at the relationship between emerging ideas of race and the environment in the 18th century. From theories of the mutability of race in different climates to the creation of racialized labor on plantations, the 18th century is a crucial period in the development of ideas about race, ideas that are crucially linked to the environment and that have a profound influence on the contemporary world. By returning to this period, we can more accurately learn what true environmental justice might entail.
As a scholar of early America, I am always looking for links between the 18th and 19th centuries and the contemporary moment, and I think environmental justice provides a crucial framework for students to understand the influence of American history on the present day.”
Rupal Mangukiya, Thomas McKenna Meredith ’48 Lecturer in Environmental Science
Course Title: Mapping Inequality and Community Narratives in Hartford
“This course introduces environmental justice through the study of Hartford, focusing on how environmental benefits and burdens are distributed across neighborhoods surrounding Trinity College. Using guided neighborhood walks, GIS mapping, community narratives, and scholarly literature, students will investigate how patterns of segregation, disinvestment, and environmental inequality are reflected in the city’s contemporary landscape.
The course reflects my interests in environmental justice, sustainability, and geospatial analysis by combining GIS-based spatial inquiry with community-engaged learning to help students critically examine environmental inequalities and their social and historical roots.”
Brittany Starr, Lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric
Course Title: Digital Rhetorics of Environmental Justice
“This course teaches students how to make sense of environmental justice activism and social change in the digital age. Students will study different theoretical frameworks for understanding environmental justice, investigate how social media can (and cannot) be used to effect meaningful social and cultural change, and collaborate to create a public-facing archive of environmental activism in the digital age.
My scholarship focuses on how activists and change-makers, particularly those with marginalized identities, navigate the constraints of digital media to re/claim agency in public discourse, shift oppressive norms, and create just social and cultural change.”
Community Co-Instruction Grants
These awards support the Trinity faculty member and community partner to co-teach a class related to environmental justice.
Garth Myers, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies and Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies
Course Title: Learning from Hartford
Garth Myers’ fall 2026 first-year seminar, “Learning from Hartford,” will be co-taught with Saukiog Intertribal Council members including Kaleb Garrett, Jay StrongBuffalo, Lee Mixashawn Rozie (IDP Class of 2010), and Ron Narcisse. Students will read Mixashawn’s book, Indigenous Roots of Social Evolution: Interpretation of Historical Data, as one of the core texts for the class and will be engaged in work building toward the October 3rd Saukiog Harvest Festival. Students will be broken into three teams of five students that will research specific questions for Saukiog and questions of environmental justice.
Community Engaged Faculty Research Grant
This award supports faculty conducting community-engaged environmental research.
Victor Churchill, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Professor Churchill is a computational scientist whose research focuses on mathematical modeling and data-driven decision-making across applied domains. He asks the question, “Where should additional trees be planted in Hartford in order to maximally reduce aggregate heat exposure and improve environmental conditions across Hartford’s population?” He plans to produce updated maps of Hartford’s tree canopy and heat exposure, visualizations of candidate intervention priority regions, a written report summarizing methods and findings, and reproducible computational workflows for future extension or updating.
Peter Kyle, Associate Professor of Theater and Dance
Professor Kyle is a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and Artistic Director of Peter Kyle Dance. His project, Anatomies of Flow is a research and performance project that seeks to explore how we, as individuals and as a collective, might build a sense of renewed awareness of our physiological, energetic, and intellectual capacities in relationship to our natural environment. Drawing on a variety of movement practices, including Slow Tempo, developed by Japanese playwright/director, Shogo Ohta (1939-2007), whose work inspires fresh consideration of what it means to “be here,” and using geological, cultural, and historical understanding of rivers as source material and metaphor – the Connecticut River in particular – this project will result in the creation and performance of a production that is developed, in part, through public interactions in multiple locations across Hartford.
