Research
Current Research
Keith’s research and writing focus on racial capitalism, environmental and climate justice, environmental law and policy, carceral and abolition geographies, multispecies justice, and the state.
Across their transdisciplinary research, Keith studies the structures of racial capitalism, carcerality, and settler colonialism in the context of the US nation-state, to uncover ways that people—often provisionally—carve out abolition geographies through radical placemaking practices. They analyze the mutually constituting relationships between race, Indigeneity, environment, and the more-than-human to understand how the state operates and how people seek to resist it through abolitionist, decolonial, and autonomous praxis.
Through methods rooted in archival research, critical race studies, policy analysis, cultural studies, and dialectical materialism, Keith analyzes struggles over public housing, prison construction, militarization, borders and migration/crossing, environmental and climate justice, more-than-human geographies, and multispecies justice.
Keith’s book manuscript, The Racial Environmental State: Contested Spaces of Resistance, examines the role of environmental policy in shaping the co-constituting relationships between race and environment. The manuscript employs a research methodology centered around the racial environmental state, which allows for an examination of the fundamental ways in which race and environment shape the operations of the state. It in turn points to the terrains of struggle and social change organized through logics of racial capitalist, colonial, and imperial domination through the making and governance of the environment. That is, the racial environmental state poses contradictory sites of foreclosure and possibility for organizing and building within, against, and beyond the state.
In particular, the book focuses on the ways that the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process has transformed the logics and governance of, and community organizing around race and environment within the US since passage of the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1970.
Keith’s most recent work examines abolitionist multispecies justice through the entwined fates of forests, soils, Indigenous communities, and incarcerated firefighters by thinking through the “pyrosocial” forces of fire.
Publications
Books
The Racial Environmental State: Contested Spaces of Resistance (University of Washington Press, May 2026)
Articles
- “Notes on a World Ablaze: Toward an Abolitionist and Decolonial Multispecies Justice” (forthcoming)
- “The Art of Reimagining Borders in Patricia Vázquez Gómez’s BorderXer” (Social and Cultural Geography, 2024)
- “Carceral Jaguar Geographies along the US/México border and the Case for Border Abolition” (Local Environment, 2023)
- “The Racial Environmental State and Abolition Geography in California’s Central Valley” (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021).
- “Not Just a Walk in the Park: Methodological Improvements for Determining Environmental Justice Implications of Park Access in New York City for the Promotion of Physical Activity” (Cities and the Environment, 2013), lead author, coauthored with Andrew Maroko, Kristen Grady, Juliana Maantay, and Peter Arno.
Additional Research Interests
In addition to his research on race and the environment, Keith has been actively involved in NEH grant funded initiatives aimed at promoting the growth of Asian American Studies. Information about these projects is available on their respective websites: