Stacia Ryder is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Geography Department at the University of Exeter in the UK and a co-founder of the Center for Environmental Justice at Colorado State University. As a postdoc, she works on an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research project funded by the UK Natural Environmental Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council, entitled ‘Attitudes toward Shale Gas in Space and Time.’ The project is focused on exploring how public responses to shale gas development unfold at national, regional, and local scales in the UK. She received her PhD in Sociology in 2019 from Colorado State University, where her dissertation work involved multi-sited critical policy ethnography to explore how power exacerbates issues of procedural justice across multiple governance scale decision-making processes for regulating oil and gas development as it has encroached on urban areas in Colorado’s Front Range.
In addition to recently publishing works focused on environmental justice issues in energy contexts, Stacia has also recently co-edited two special issues on power and environmental justice for the journal Environmental Sociology. She is also the lead editor on the volume “Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures.” Broadly, her current work is focused on using theoretical frameworks of power (i.e. meta-power and intersectionality) and an environmental justice lens to explore institutions, decision-making processes, place attachment, community engagement and collective action in the context of energy policy across multiple governance scales. Moving forward, she plans to continue to advance this theoretical approach in the context of climate displacement and whole community resettlement, and how we can plan and develop policy that will allow for just and equitable transitions for displaced people and communities in the face of the current anthropogenic climate crisis.
Selected publications: