Cristina Faiver-Serna
…(she/her/ella) is a Chicana feminist and environmental justice scholar, and work at the intersection of critical ethnic studies and geography. I am currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon. My dissertation project: ‘Survival First, Health Second’: Geographies of Environmental Racism and the M(other)work of Promotoras de Salud examines the geographic relationships between the public health safety-net, environmental injustice, gendered labor, and structural processes of racialization in Latinx communities.
Broadly, I am interested in the relationship between the climate crisis and racial injustice. I am attentive to historical systems, structural processes, and knowledge formations that have accelerated climate injustice, and I ask research questions about their entanglements with various scales of racial and gender injustice. My work examines the ways in which the historical systems of settler colonialism and racial capitalism spatially manifest in environmental and racial violence, and the ways in which such violence is resisted through life-making and world-building ecologies.
My current research grew out of my practical work as a public health professional in Los Angeles County, and has been shaped by my work with promotoras de salud, as well as graduate training in public health, ethnic studies, and geography. In this project I ask: What roles do promotoras de salud (community health workers)perform in the regional response to environmental racism in Southern California? And, how are promotoras de salud called upon by the state to remediate and resolve environmental racism in their own communities?
Drawing on critical methodologies in feminist science studies, frameworks of racial capitalism critique, and building on Chicana and Latina feminist theory, I examine the spatiality of survival against state-sanctioned environmental violence that emerges from the social reproductive work of promotoras de salud. In public health literature, promotoras are often described as ‘bridges’ between healthcare and their communities. In this project, feminist analysis of how public health science conceptualizes the role and labor of promotoras de salud bridges two emerging interdisciplinary fields of study: Critical Environmental Justice Studies and Latinx Geographies. Additionally, this project has significant implications for interdisciplinary knowledge production in Latinx studies, health geography, and public health policy and practice, as well as world-building efforts toward the abolition of environmental racism and the struggle for justice.
I am a founding member of the American Association of Geographers Latinx Geographies Specialty Group, and currently serve as an Activity Director. I have been envisioning and theorizing ‘Latinx geographies with my collaborator, Madelaine Cahuas, and other co-conspirators, through community-building discussions at the AAG annual meeting and beyond since 2017.
My writing and collaborative research has been published in Society and Space, the annals of the American Association of Geographers, and I have a chapter in Lessons on Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, edited by Michael Mascahrenas (2020). I also have forthcoming work in The Professional Geographer with my co-author, Tianna Bruno.