The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color or national origin. And the development implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. So that's like it's a mouthful, right? But essentially it gets that fair and equitable distribution of environmental bads and policy shapes that. So environmental bads, it's just essentially any negative output that impacts human health and the environment.

So things like air pollution, carbon emissions, Toxic waste. And sometimes it can also take the form of things like earthquakes, right? Induced by shale gas development and things like where are these facilities that produce toxic waste placed? Physically as a child, I was fairly active. I did a lot of things, sports things, right? So softball and soccer, but also like tumbling gymnastics dances all over the place.

What I really enjoyed were social activities and educational activities as well. So I was in Girl Scouts, which was a lot of fun. And in the summers and on the weekends I would my mom would enroll me in these workshops in camp. So like there was a reading camp that I went to every summer that was hosted by the local library that I loved I wouldn't miss it.

I also went to science camp specifically for girls looking like a STEM program designed to kind of show young women what science is all about. There is a nonprofit in Austin, Texas, called Girl Start, which is hoping to recruit girls into stem I also spent a lot of time with family, so I'm an only child and it's I have a it's just me and my mom.

And but I have a large extended family. So every weekend we are getting together and, you know, we had barbecues and parties and would play games together and spend a lot of time at the beach. We I grew up in South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, which is just 30 minutes away from South Padre Island. So that's where we spent weekends and summers and stuff.

So as a kid, I definitely had an interest in science and social justice, but I hadn't yet merge the two I didn't really understand that those things could intersect until I was in college. But as a child, I was very interested in marine biology. Like I said, I grew up really close to the beach and we would go there often.

So I cared a lot about the landscape and sea creatures and dolphins in particular. And I remember I think it was on TV, I somehow found out about this issue of netting like tuna fish netting, catching dolphins and leading to them being murdered essentially is what it felt like when I was hearing about it. And I was really distraught and especially as, like I said, I wanted to be a marine biologist, I was super interested in that part of science.

So I, I read as much as I could at my local library because I did spend a lot of time at the library about this issue and decided that I was going to single handedly fix this. People just clearly didn't know about it, and that was the problem. So I like put together little buttons, like I had my mom take me to Walmart and get poster board, and I launched a campaign in my school for Dolphin Free Tuna I can't remember a specific event or like influences that really shaped my motivation to or my engagement with science because it's just kind of always been there.

Same with social justice. I've been fairly inclined to make sure that people were treated fairly. Yeah, in a in a scholarly sense. In an academic sense. But my grandparents immigrated here and my mom and all of her siblings, my grandparents engaged like they did migrant farm work. And I grew up hearing about that, like hearing stories about them being in the fields.

And we would drive by large like agricultural plots and they would share stories about how they were picking fruits or vegetables. And it was really hot and they had to cover their faces with scarves to avoid like inhaling pesticides. Right. And or like sharing how they would see other people who were working in the fields develop rashes on their hands from touching the fruit.

You needed gloves. And so before I heard about environmental justice and was introduced to the concept in an academic sense, I already kind of had an understanding that there were some places and some people that bore the brunt of environmental burdens or bads in our society. I never did migrant farm work, and I wouldn't have to and I knew that.

But because my grandparents were immigrants and they they didn't have a lot of options economically at the time in terms of employment. They had no other choice. But I did. So I kind of I don't know, I kind of understood that before taking this class. But hearing about that hearing about environmental justice in that context was really validating.

And it kind of like it set my soul on fire. It was incredible. A lot of my environmental justice work is quantitative, which means that I work with numbers. I work with survey data, information that people provide that can be quantifiable in some way I also work with secondary data, which means that I work with data that other people have put together, that I have access to as a member of the public.

So the Environmental Protection Agency is a great source for data. The census is also another really great data source, and I work with both of those things to try and understand. Mostly citing so where environmental burdens and hazards are placed in relation to people. So a typical day and an environmental justice project on that front is really just hopping on the computer, working with large data sets and trying to piece them together.

So I'm working on a project with the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center The larger project is looking at what the societal functions of critical infrastructure are. So critical infrastructure being things like highways and roads, more specifically water, utility services so the water that comes through your tap at home and power, electricity and trying to identify how people adapt to disruptions or changes in those infrastructure.

So what happens when you lose water service at home? What happens when the power goes out? How do you adapt to that, particularly in the context of there are these extreme weather events that can knock out power and water service for folks. So in Texas and in Oklahoma, too, in the spring, there was the freeze right winter storm URI that knocked out electrical service for a lot of folks across the entire state of Texas and also water utility services as well.

So in that project, I'm sitting down with people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who experienced any amount of disruption in water and electricity service during the winter storm and learning more about their experiences to try and understand how what it means to that water and electrical service means to them and their ability to function on a day to day basis.

What I've learned is that even for folks who didn't have a ton of disruption, right? So some folks only lost water or electricity for 20 minutes and some people didn't lose any. What I'm finding so far, because data collection is still ongoing, is that it means a lot for these things to occur. Even if they don't, it doesn't directly impact people's ability to access water or electricity in their own homes.

There's a lot of stress. People are really nervous and distraught at seeing how many other people lost power A sense of trust in the institutions responsible for ensuring utility services are provided was totally eroded and all around that water and electrical utilities services mean a lot more than just like turning on your tap and flipping on a light switch.

So that's the cool thing about sociology and social science in general, is that you study society, which means there's not really a limit or a boundary to what can inspire you to research something. I have colleagues who study street art like graffiti, or I have someone that I used to work with, did her entire thesis on. Um, is it B to S that big Korean pop band?

Yeah. Um, somebody else who did their like thesis on drag queens and movies. Right There is, there is not one particular thing that can inspire a research question or a project for me in terms of my interest in adaptations and weather related events more broadly. I mean, it's, it goes back to a justice thing. Right. We know that there is some people who experience the same weather related events very differently.

People aren't able to recover from experiencing or living through a disaster the same way. Um, depending on a lot of different factors, things like household composition, socioeconomic status, but also where they are physically. Um, in terms of do you live in a city or in a rural area, do you live on the coast or not? Um, for the project regarding disruptions to water and power in the winter storm in Texas, I was in Texas when the power and when the winter storm happened, and my family and I were without water for seven days and without power for three So it was very, very personal, like seeing firsthand and experiencing firsthand what that was like.

I realized myself, hey, this is more than just like I said, the ability to switch on a light or turn on the tap. So for my master's thesis, I did a quantitative and spatial examination of environmental justice issues in Houston. Texas, and that's a lot of words to just say that like I use maps and math to try and identify where pollutants were and who was who were exposed to them.

And I use data from 2015. All of the research before indicated exactly what I said earlier, which is that communities of color and the poor disproportionately bear the brunt of environmental hazards. Um, and so I didn't find that exactly in my own analysis and I was very confused and convinced that I had done something wrong. I remember I literally ran to my advisor's office and it was like, Chad, I did something wrong.

I don't know what this means. And he looked at my, he looked at my output and he said, well, everything's configured properly, so why don't you just think about it? Like, take it back and think about it. There's no such thing as, like, a wrong answer, right? Um, and it could be good, actually, that this is unexpected. And so I started to think more about what Houston looked like in 20, 15, and I realized that Houston have started to experience a lot of urban revitalization or gentrification.

So you had people moving around pretty quickly and buying property in areas that had previously been economically depressed. Um, and all of these demographic changes, again, were happening fairly quickly. But if you think about the sources of environmental health hazards, they're fairly stationary so like a factory that produces something that outputs toxins into the air isn't going to be able to move as quickly as people are.

So what I found was that in 20, 15 in Houston, it was actually folks who were white who were more likely to be exposed to this particular kind of health hazard. And that totally contradicts what the literature had found before. But what's new is that there's gentrification occurring and people are moving around. So that actually yielded a pretty robust like line of inquiry for me and my career.

I'm still looking at gentrification and environmental justice and how if we can see if hazards move as people do or not. Um, and that's, but I remember that so clearly, like, literally, like I completely ruined this project like, this is a failure. Like, I didn't find what everybody else found. What does this mean? And then I was just simply told, like, no, go back and think about it.

Like, there's no such thing as, like, a wrong answer here. My field isn't male dominated, but my subfield, it feels like it is an environmental sociology. And in quantitative social science research, I tend to work with a lot of men there. Initially there's I perceive an amount of doubt or skepticism at my own abilities. Quantitatively, I might not be asked to lead on a larger project.

The quantitative components of, um, like data collection, um, And initially that was like a bummer. I found that frustrating because it's like, why aren't why aren't my skills being used to their full potential? But then I pretty quickly realized that that just provided me an avenue to further develop other like data collection skills. I received this advice from my mentor who got her Ph.D. in sociology, and it was still very much a male dominated field.

And she told me that I could be humble, but that I needed to let people know. And so that's kind of like the general attitude that I go into those situations with. It's just like, okay, if people might not initially think that I'm able to engage with the research this way because there's a perception that quantitative research is more male dominated Um, that's fine.

I'll just show them later. I do have allies, though. My advisors are really great, and my advisors have mostly been men. So early on in my Ph.D. program, we have to take like statistics right and I realize that my one of my male colleagues were a lot better at asking the faculty member who was teaching to stop and to repeat themselves.

And so I had to, like, force myself to do the same thing because it doesn't come intuitively. I hadn't been socialized to do that. Um, in terms of advice that I would give to others. Don't be afraid to do that. To ask someone to stop and repeat themselves, to ask for help, or if you don't know what you need to ask.

Exactly. Like sometimes we find ourselves in situations where it's like, I don't even know where to start. I just really don't get it. Just say that communication and letting people know what you need is the best way that you're going to get what you need. And there are so many people and programs, particularly for women interested or young girls interested in STEM, like, this is great.

So Pre-pandemic, it was a lot of like small scale travel. So lots of road trips. My partner, I might yeah, my partner lives pre-pandemic in the DFW area, so we would very frequently go back and forth during the weekends or meet each other halfway at different places in Oklahoma. To just kind of spend time with each other and, uh, experience new things.

Um, since COVID particularly during the lockdown, we started watching a lot of movies that you think everybody did. Right. That's a pretty common way that people coped with being, like, locked up at home. But that's kind of stuck with us. Even as things are opening back up, we still get together and watch movies with our friends. We get together remotely on Zoom to, like, pick a theme, and then each suggest a movie and then talk about it for like, like all day, like an entire Saturday.

So I like to watch movies. I like event production, but particularly in undergrad, even before I started college and in my master's program, I did event production with comedy. I did event production with different kinds of performances um never music event production. Um, but like theater stuff. I've had a lot of different project ideas around, for example, when I was doing standup around standup and what it was like for a women doing standup because standup is.

MALE-DOMINATED Yeah. Um, a. So, yeah, for sure. But usually it's the other way around. Usually the things that I found in my research or my work influence how I experience or engage with movies or these different events Middle school and high school. I don't think I had a sociology class, right. But I had social studies, which is related generally but I think just being really active and engaged in science classes, but also in things like social studies will really help anyone who's interested in social science when they do get to college.

Right. Um, also the American Sociological Association, they have a website that folks can check out and has like a ton of information and resources for high schoolers or anyone really wants to get their feet wet with sociology Hey, I'm super excited to introduce you to your activity. You're going to be playing the extreme event game put together by Lab Ex for National Academy of Sciences.

This game is a really great way to get you thinking about all the ways our community comes together. During a disaster. This is a fantastic role playing game that will give you an idea of what it's like to be an active part of a community dealing with all of the things that might go wrong in a natural disaster like a flood, earthquake or hurricane.

You and your classmates represent residents of the city and will be assigned different jobs and neighborhoods in your groups. You'll accumulate and trade emergency resource cards. Each neighborhood will then decide how to use the resources on the cards to respond to different types of challenges that appear based on the different locations in the city. Teachers, there's a lot to this game, but don't worry.

The only thing you need to provide is Wi-Fi enabled computers or tablets or just a printer. The best place to start is to play a test game for yourself to get an idea of what it's like. The test game includes the facilitator script and walks you through step by step, just like it will be in the main game when you go to labx.org.

Click on the extreme event link from there. The game portal button will take you to the page where you can launch both the main game and the test game. The extreme event game is such a great way to explore the challenges of disaster responce within communities. It's fun to facilitate and to play, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have