Environmental justice in U.S. South the focus of MSU geosciences faculty’s research
by Sam Kealhofer, Intern on the A&S Research Support Team
Brian S. Williams, an assistant professor in the geosciences department at Mississippi State University, focuses his research on the intersections of racism, environmental justice and agricultural development, examining the connection between plantation agriculture and contemporary industrial agriculture, and the implications of Black landownership and community development for contemporary agro-environmental justice.
Focusing on the development and political-ecological legacy of cotton plantation agriculture in the United States South, alongside geography’s agrarian resistance and community development, his research examines the way racism and agrarian capitalism have shaped dynamics of pesticide usage and exposure.
Williams’ most recent work, “‘The fabric of our lives’?: Cotton, pesticides, and agrarian racial regimes in the U.S. South,” published in The Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2020), focuses on archival pesticide advertisements and USDA films to examine the ways racism has shaped ideals of what constitutes agricultural “best practices.” In Williams’ words, “constructed hierarchies of human worth” influenced the increasing usage of pesticides in cotton plantation agriculture while shaping the dynamics of environmental injustice.
His recently co-authored article with Mark Riley of the University of Liverpool, “The challenge of oral history to environmental history,” was published in Environment and History journal (2020) and highlights the important contributions oral history provides for environmental research. According to the article by Williams and Riley, oral history is a “practice which grounds knowledge production in the realm of daily life, experiential meaning-making, and material practices” and it “provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal—and deepening—of the radical roots of environmental history.”
Williams and Riley contend that the field of environmental history still is influenced by colonial accounts and archives and that the inclusion of oral histories challenges traditional concepts of what counts as authoritative environmental knowledge.
Another recent article, “Anthropocene, capitalocene, ... plantationocene?: A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises,” (2019) coauthored with Janae Davis, Alex Moulton, and Levi Van Sant, wrestles with current frameworks used to understand the legacy of plantations and global environmental crisis. The article suggests that current research does not appropriately engage with the racial politics and ecological inequities inherent in the plantation model. Drawing on Black geographic and ecological work, this article stresses the ongoing legacies of the plantation—including systemic racism and environmental destructiveness—are central to contemporary environmental crises. Black geographies oriented toward community development and ecological abundance, according to the authors, are crucial to imagining and securing more just and sustainable futures amidst systemic crises.
Williams’ research examines the racial, environmental and economic dimensions of the plantation system and the legacy it leaves, while emphasizing the necessity of centering racial justice and equity in work for environmental sustainability. This work provides insight into Mississippi’s historical and contemporary geographies by connecting the environmental and agricultural present to the state’s plantation past.
In an effort to contribute solutions to the various challenges facing the nation, as well as insight into other points of interest, the College of Arts and Sciences will continue to highlight faculty research in our “Research in the Headlines” series each Monday and Wednesday. For more research in the headlines, visit https://www.cas.msstate.edu/research/researchintheheadlines/; and for information about the College of Arts and Sciences or the Department of Geosciences, visit https://www.cas.msstate.edu/ or https://www.geosciences.msstate.edu/.