Research
Current Research
Keith’s research and writing focus on racial capitalism, environmental and climate justice, environmental law and policy, carceral and abolition geographies, and the state.
Keith’s book manuscript, The Difference Environment Makes: Race and Environmental Impact Assessment, examines the role of environmental policy in shaping the mutually constituting relationships between race and environment. The manuscript builds a case for a theory of the racial environmental state. This is a framework for examining 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.
Within the manuscript, this framework enables an examination of 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. This research builds on Keith’s doctoral dissertation, titled “Institutionalizing Environmental Justice: Race, Place, and the National Environmental Policy Act.”
In addition to this book manuscript, Keith’s current research examines multibeing/multispecies justice through the entwined fates of forests, soils, Indigenous communities, and incarcerated firefighters by thinking through the “pyrosocial” forces of wildfire.
Publications
- “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: