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In this article, we explore rights of nature (RoN) as an emerging rights-based environmental governance that intends to reframe nature from property to an entity with a right to exist unharmed. Its proponents claim this is a paradigm shift that reworks the imbalanced human–nature hierarchy. We interrogate this claim using data collected from more than 60 U.S. communities where RoN ordinances have been implemented. Our analysis identifies three reoccurring themes within the U.S. settler colonial context, including a coconstitution of rights for nature alongside a community's right to a healthy environment, the emphasis of self-governance and individual community empowerment, and the overwhelming Whiteness of settler communities that implement RoN laws. We put these themes into conversation with critical race scholarship, which evaluates the racialized impacts of a liberal legal system of rights to examine how within the U.S. settler colonial context RoN mobilizes Western White liberal conceptions of legal rights to address our current environmental crises. In analyzing these themes through the lens of critical race scholarship, we contend that rights-based environmental governance in the form of RoN laws appears to reinforce many of the entrenched social-legal-environmental relations that characterize White liberalism recast through a language that claims universal rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The women of the Newtown Florist Club (NFC), a social and environmental justice organization located in Gainesville, Georgia, use storytelling both in their day-to-day lives and through their political activism to contest the environmental and social injustices they experience. In this paper, I draw on Black geographies and Black feminist storytelling to demonstrate how critical environmental justice scholars can use stories to interrogate systemic environmental injustices. I integrate this theoretical framework with the stories told by NFC members to contend that stories have both theoretical and methodological saliency. Stories facilitate an integration of the structural with lived experiences by highlighting (1) the contradictions activist navigate, (2) the ways activists draw support and motivation from connections to people and place, and (3) the ways activists use the past to connect the personal and political to imagine and prefigure new futures. In conclusion, I reflect on listening to activists’ stories as one way for researchers to operationalize critical environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use an interaction between environmental justice activists, local city officials, and representatives of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish the role of place-based identities in intersectional politics of belonging for environmental justice activists. I analyze a conversation around the word we that occurred during a Collaborative Problem Solving workshop run by EPA Region 4 to explore how mundane, everyday practices of politics of belonging impact environmental justice activists' abilities to achieve their self-defined goal. I examine how activists and city officials used the term we, colloquially a term of inclusion, as a political tool. The term was simultaneously used to make distinctions about who did and did not belong and to eliminate differences by homogenizing the broader we. For environmental justice activists, the workshop brought to the forefront the influence of geography on intersectional positionalities. While discussions and lack of specification of we may seem benign, in practice, they define belonging and exclusion, reinforcing existing power structures that perpetuate environmental injustices. From a theoretical perspective, I highlight the importance of place as an intersectional axis of difference for critical environmental justice scholars. In conclusion, I reflect on how intersectionality can be used to rethink conceptions of we in micro-scalar politics of belonging for environmental justice activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper that explores the opportunities and challenges faced through the creation of the Newtown Florist Writing Collective to answer the need for the women of the Newtown Florist Club of Gainesville, Georgia to tell their stories to people who can help them improve their quality of life. Topics include the principles of Gramscian political ecology, the history of the Newtown Florist Club, and the challenges of writing collectively.

In this article, we explore the role of self-reflexivity in the understanding of positionality in human geography to argue that self-reflexivity in and of itself does not offer researchers sufficient opportunities to question and critique their fluid, ever-changing positionalities. Drawing on the work of feminist scholars, critical race scholars, and experiences carrying out qualitative research, we argue that formal and informal conversations with colleagues and mentors affords the opportunity to deeply engage with positionalities. This article draws on concepts of ‘everyday talk’ to encourage researchers to explore their positionalities through kitchen table reflexivity – an exploration of an individual's positionality and its relationship to their research carried out through formal and informal conversations with others. We demonstrate how everyday talk with each other furthered our understandings of our fluid identities in relation to our research participants. Through these conversations, we were able to more critically interrogate our identity and not simply reduce identity to a laundry list of perceived similarities and differences between research participants and us. In conclusion, we encourage all researchers to use everyday talk as one way to complicate their positionalities and to reflect on how this process relates to the broader societal and academic environment within which they carry out their research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]