Building more epistemically inclusive and environmentally equitable universities

Higher educational institutions tend to draw from mainstream approaches to environmentalism that reinforce race, class, and gender hierarchies around who constitutes “an environmentalist” and what activities constitute “environmentalism.” As a result, students of color and students from other marginalized backgrounds who often experience environmental degradation and catastrophe firsthand do not often see their experiences reflected in universities’ environmental programming, curricula, or research. Furthermore, faculty and staff who center issues of race, equity, power, and justice when addressing environmental topics tend to work in isolation from one another and their efforts are not well-coordinated. In this paper, we draw from the concept of “epistemic exclusion” (Settles et al. J Divers High Educ 14:493, 2021; J High Educ 93:31–55, 2022) to explain hidden biases that systematically devalue scholarship that does not fit mainstream parameters. We describe a research project focused on building more equity-centered environmental efforts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We find that faculty and staff across divisions want to engage in more epistemically inclusive and equity-centered environmental work, but lack the institutional support and resources (e.g., knowledge, funding, time, incentives) to do so. Interestingly, only a few responses focused on the barriers and biases related to epistemic exclusion. Our findings suggest that more awareness is needed to identify, analyze, and challenge these less visible barriers to substantively work towards greater inclusivity in environmentalism.