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Anindita Hridita, SPIKE Center Student Emissary, Department of Environmental Studies, Understanding Justice and Resilience in the Face of Climate Change among Fishing Communities in Coastal Bangladesh

Anindita’s research examines how climate change is transforming the lives and livelihoods of fishing communities in coastal Bangladesh. Through a longitudinal study of fishing households, she explores how climate stressors reshape livelihood practices, how cultural and religious norms including gendered roles influence adaptation strategies, and how social, economic, and environmental factors shape household decisions to migrate or remain in place. Grounded in a justice-oriented framework, her work centers the lived experiences of climate-vulnerable communities to better understand resilience amid ongoing uncertainties.

Annika Hirmke, Department of Geography, Community Solar, Extractive Legacies, and Energy Justice in Montana

Annika's research examines whether community solar projects can offer a meaningful departure from the extractive energy systems that have long shaped Montana's landscapes and burdened its communities. Through ethnographic fieldwork at three community solar sites — a declining agricultural town (Lewistown), a former coal town turned tourist hub (Red Lodge), and the Blackfeet Reservation — she investigates how solar infrastructures mediate ecological, economic, and social transformation, and how place-specific histories of electrification, mining, and settler colonialism shape what energy justice looks like in practice. Grounded in a relational place-making approach, her work takes seriously both the transformative potential of community solar and the limits of reform within larger extractive systems, centering the perspectives of Native tribes, ranching families, organizers, and utility workers as they deliberate what just energy futures should be.

Maggie McNulty, Department of History, Pollution, Resilience, and Digital Storytelling in Denver's Globeville and Elyria-Swansea Neighborhoods

Maggie's research examines how the 80216 zip code — home to Denver's neighborhoods of Globeville and Elyria-Swansea — became one of the most polluted in the United States. Her dissertation traces over a century of industrial development, highway construction, and regulatory failure that has concentrated environmental harm in these communities. Alongside her scholarly work, she is collaborating with The Green House Connection Center and The Abolition Garden to build a community-facing digital storytelling platform that weaves together resident interviews, PhotoVoice documentation, spoken-word poetry, a GIS StoryMap, and a youth-created zine library rooted in Indigenous ecological knowledge. Centering everyday stories of care, resistance, and survival rather than damage alone, the project aims to expand whose voices and experiences enter the historical record — and to do so in both English and Spanish.

Musabber Ali Chisty, Department of Sociology, Hurricane Preparedness, Intersectional Vulnerability, and Environmental Justice among Bangladeshi Migrants in Florida

Musabber's research examines how Bangladeshi migrant communities living along the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast of Florida prepare for — and are left out of — the United States' disaster preparedness infrastructure. Drawing on mixed methods including community surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews, he investigates how intersecting factors such as immigration status, language access, socioeconomic position, and social capital shape household preparedness and resilience. Grounded in an environmental justice framework, his work critiques the exclusion of migrant and citizenship status from federal preparedness indices and centers the strengths, coping strategies, and prior disaster experience that Bangladeshi migrants bring with them — rather than treating them solely as a vulnerable population. The project also aims to facilitate the formation of a community-led mutual aid network as a model for bottom-up disaster risk reduction.

Sindhu Nepolean, SPIKE Center Student Emissary, Department of Communication, Maritime Emergencies, Blue Economy Policy, and Environmental Justice on the Indian Coast

Sindhu's research examines how India's rapidly expanding blue economy is reshaping the lives and livelihoods of artisanal fishing communities along its coastlines. Through a qualitative case study of the 2025 MSC Elsa 3 shipwreck off the Kerala coast — in which a container vessel carrying hazardous cargo capsized near a newly developed deep-sea port — she investigates how state and national governments managed the crisis, how affected fishing communities experienced and narrated the disaster, and how caste identity shaped their vulnerability and exclusion from decision-making. Grounded in an environmental justice framework and drawing on her own lived experience as a member of a traditional fishing community in India, her work centers the voices of small-scale fishers to interrogate the uneven distribution of risk and benefit under neoliberal coastal development policy.

Warren Cook, Department of Communication, Cattle Feed Ecologies: Water, Technology, and Anticolonial Futures in the US West

Warren's research examines how the US cattle feed industry — and alfalfa farming in particular — is confronting unsustainable water consumption amid the aridification of the American West. Through qualitative fieldwork with small-scale and Indigenous alfalfa farmers in Colorado, he explores how proposed technological and ecological solutions negotiate more or less just water futures, and how farmers most impacted by aridification envision adaptation. Grounded in procedural justice and the theory of just transition, his work centers farmer voices — including those of Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute producers — and is building toward a public oral history archive guided by the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.