 I am eager to facilitate difficult conversations because I have had that modeled for me. And I've had it modeled for me in really wonderful and great ways. And I've had it modeled for me really poorly. And I think some of my formative educational experiences were actually around conversations that weren't conversations, that were directives or something other than conversations. And the field that I teach in environmental studies is a complex field, and it's evaluated, and students come to this field. I came to this field because we feel passionately and have concern about the Earth's challenges and humanity's challenges. And it's hard to imagine engaging in that topical area without having difficult conversations. So I can think back on my time as an undergraduate student when I was majoring in engineering, which is very different from what I do now. And conversation is not something that happened in the engineering curriculum in the late 1990s. Hopefully it is now. And my classes were a lot, involved a lot of faculty standing in front of a chalkboard and writing furiously and every now and then turning around and saying something at us. And it wasn't until I started taking coursework in science and technology studies where faculty asked students to really put themselves out there and offer our suggestions and our perspectives. And it kind of opened up a whole new world for me of thinking about learning and teaching in a new way. And so I try to bring that into my classrooms virtually and in person as a faculty member. I would say it's gotten easier over time and largely that is because of my identity. So that is true for the subject matter I teach too. So I teach largely about questions and concerns around environmental justice to the intersections of race and class and gender and the environment. And I can stand up in front of a class and ask people these tough questions about how they engage with race and ask them to reflect on their own identity. And because I am who I am and I look the way I look and I have tenure and I have all of these privileges conferred to me, those conversations are not so difficult for me. And I recognize that that is not something that all of my colleagues are able to do. And so I try to keep that and hold that and hold onto the fact that that is what is sort of guiding my ability to have these conversations. Because we're in a space at least in my college and my department that is a predominantly white student population, I can ask certain questions of white students because I am white as well. And so for better or worse, I think that my identity does play into my ability to ask these sorts of questions and to engage in these conversations and to challenge students to reflect on their own experiences and identity and perceptions. Most of my teaching and research surrounds the idea of environmental justice. And so environmental justice has been a field of academic inquiry and also a social movement in the United States for a handful of decades now. And really what the environmental justice movement says and the questions that the environmental justice researchers ask are around disproportionate exposure to environmental harms. That's been the center point of environmental justice. So there's a pattern that holds true across most of the United States that says that communities of color and poor communities tend to be disproportionately affected by environmental hazards, right? By negative environmental impacts. Those impacts could be air pollution. It could be the impacts of displacement due to climate change. It could be noise pollution. And so that's really the focus. And then I like to ask lots of questions also about representation and identity within the environmental movement itself. So the US environmental movement, the organizations that most people associate with the environmental movement, many of them have a really sort of complicated history with race and class. Many of the early environmental heroes in this country were also eugenicists. There's a strong link between sort of population control and eugenics and the environmental movement. And those foundations infuse the way that environmental work is done today as well. So in my classes, we try to sort of tease that stuff apart. I was just this morning actually looking at a paper that students wrote in a group for my class. So some students are writing a paper about mountain biking and the potentially exclusionary nature of mountain biking and other outdoor recreation. And in the environmental movement, there's this interesting tie between outdoor recreation and environmental values and environmental behavior. So they were interested as students who are not into the mountain biking culture to kind of explore that and imagine what that might feel like for a person who is not able-bodied or who is a black woman or doesn't fit this archetypal mountain biker ideal or image that many folks have. And so I was reading their paper and they're talking about the history of mountain biking and the history, as they tell it and as many others tell it, starts in Marin County, California, and you can kind of conjure an image in your head of what that looks like and who those mountain bikers are. And what I told them is that there's this other part of that history that isn't told in these dominant narratives.