Transversal Climate Justice: A Multi-Year Research Agenda
My research sits at the intersection of transitional justice, global governance, and climate justice, examining how communities, civil society actors, and institutions respond to injustice amid compounding political, social, and environmental pressures. This work is anchored in the justicecraft framework — an analytical lens I have developed with colleagues over the past decade for understanding how justice is practiced, contested, and reshaped from below.
A central strand of this agenda advances what my co-author Christopher K. Lamont and I call transversal climate justice: an approach that moves beyond disciplinary and transnational framings to trace how climate change connects to migration, public health, development, and human rights. Climate change is not only an environmental problem but a justice problem — its burdens fall unevenly on populations who have contributed least to its causes, and its governance is shaped by histories of inequality that cut across borders and scales.
Building on this foundation, a multi-year line of empirical research examines the gendered and intersectional dimensions of climate-related human mobility. Recent collaborative work in Progress in Disaster Science analyzes how National Adaptation Plans in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Fiji shape — and too often constrain — women’s agency across the mobility cycle. An ongoing companion project investigates how civil society organizations across African countries operate as de facto governance actors in translating gender-sensitive adaptation commitments into practice. Together, this research reframes mobility not as a failure of adaptation but as a potentially transformative risk-management strategy, provided governance systems expand rather than restrict the capabilities of those most exposed to climate risk.
Alongside this climate-justice agenda, I continue to work on youth-led, art-based activism as a site where new justice claims emerge — a subject developed in my book manuscript under review with a major University Press, “Alternative Justice.” I direct Project AROS Lab (PAL) at Montclair State University, where undergraduate researchers are integrated into this broader program, and I hold affiliations with the Global Governance Institute in Brussels, NYU, and Columbia.
Watch Wilson Center NOW interviews on:
- Forced African Migration to the U.S. Through the Lens of Memory Studies
- “LGBT Rights in the Post-Arab Spring Middle East”
- “Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet Wins Nobel Peace Prize”
- “From War to Peace: In Search of Transitional Justice.”