New Faculty Members

John Jay College is dedicated to issues of environmental justice and sustainability. As part of an ongoing commitment to these issues the College hired three new faculty dedicated to the program. With the addition of these faculty members the program plans to expand both our student and community facing offerings in environmental justice.  

LaDawn Haglund

Dr. Haglund’s research and teaching are in the areas of human rights, environmental justice, political economy, and socially transformative processes. Her work analyzing the social and political dimensions of sustainability and environmental governance has received support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and the Brazilian Fulbright Commission. She has done research in Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, India, and South Africa.

Dr. Haglund is co-editor (with Robin Stryker) of Closing the Rights Gap: From Human Rights to Social Transformation (UC Press), which theorizes the processes, mechanisms, and pathways by which rights are more or less effectively realized in practice and offers a framework and strategies for achieving meaningful social change. Her other publications include Limiting Resources: Market-Led Reform and the Transformation of Public Goods (Penn State Press) as well as numerous book chapters and articles in Sustainability, Latin American Perspectives, Journal of Human Rights, Water Policy, European Journal of Sociology, and The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture, and Politics.

Prior to coming to John Jay, she served as Faculty Lead for Justice & Social Inquiry and Academic Assembly President for Tempe at Arizona State University, where she founded and directed ASU’s Human Rights Film Festival and continues as a Senior Global Futures Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.

Alejandro García Lozano

Alejandro García Lozano is a new Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at John Jay. Alejandro’s research (and teaching) focuses on human-environment relations and the politics of natural resource governance. Their work has primarily focused on management and labor challenges in the context of small-scale fisheries in Latin America, which often face conditions of marginalization and dispossession despite their outsized contributions to nutrition, livelihoods, and communities. More broadly, Alejandro’s work examines how different sets of actors engage in collective action to influence institutional arrangements such as policies and negotiate access to resources. Ultimately, by paying attention to these intersecting concerns, Alejandro’s research seeks to understand the kinds of social relations necessary for sustaining commons or commoning – that is, forms of co-existence that prioritize the shared and collective nature of the world, challenging the primacy of the individual, private property, and inequitable or oppressive forms of governing. 

In a recent postdoctoral research project, Alejandro conducted a collaborative and comprehensive assessment of labor issues in the jumbo flying squid fishery (Dosidicus gigas) in Peru, centering questions about what decent workcould look like in small-scale fisheries. Previously, Alejandro’s doctoral research examined the history and politics of fishing cooperatives in Mexico, and the forms of collective action emerging from regional and national cooperative organizations. Alejandro’s future work will continue investigating the links between labor and environmental exploitation in seafood production and other sectors, the kinds of collective action emerging in response, and the potential of worker-led social and labor movements to drive adaptations and improve resilience to climate change. They also seek to establish a research program investigating the role of ecological restoration projects as sites for articulating and enacting alternative climate futures and forms of multi-species co-existence. These projects and their environmental aspirations also intersect with calls to make environmental conservation more inclusive and equitable – a good opportunity to examine how and in what sense these interventions advance environmental and climate justice. 

Silvinia (Bibi) Calderaro 

Bibi Calderaro is a new Lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY in the Interdisciplinary Studies and the Environmental Justice Programs. She is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who weaves theories and practices from art, education, media/technology studies, environmental studies and ecology. Her research explores land-based pedagogies and ideas of abundance and diversity within regenerative frames. Her collaborative work explores decolonial and multispecies temporalities and the politics and poetics of land/water uses. A recent and continuing pedagogical project is based on the Hudson River Estuary, where she brings participants to spend time in kayaks to connect humans with the river and its many non-human inhabitants in experiential ways and explore frugality, decarbonization, de-assimilation and horizontal governance.

As an immigrant from the Global South living in NYC, Bibi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships internationally. She is candidate in the PhD Urban Education Program at The Graduate Center CUNY. She holds an MPhil in Urban Education with a concentration in Climate Justice, as well as degrees in Sustainability Science and Education (MA), and a Social Practice MFA from Queens College, CUNY. She is certified in Regenerative Social and Ecological Design (Omega Institute), and as Nature and Forest Therapy Guide (ANFT).

For more information please contact Dr. Sandra Swenson (ssweson@jjay.cuny.edu) or Dr. Jennifer Rutledge (jrutledge@jjay.cuny.edu).