Online Certificate
Environmental Justice and Inequality
The world needs interdisciplinary thinkers to tackle environmental challenges faced by marginalized communities.
The Certificate of Advanced Study in Environmental Justice and Inequality is designed to equip people interested in social and justice issues, including environmental professionals, community leaders, and advocates, with the analytical skills to deeply engage existing research and evidence on the unique environmental vulnerabilities faced by marginalized communities. This engagement uses a theory and case-based grounding in the structural and systemic factors that generate and perpetuate these inequities. The program’s interdisciplinary approach includes tools and methods drawn from geography, sociology, environmental and public health, policy and law, sustainability science, and critical race theory. It builds upon these frameworks to develop new strategies for equitable and liberatory practice.
Get to know the program
Students in our fully online program will learn to:
- Analyze connections among political, economic, and social forces and describe how these forces act in concert to shape environments
- Apply environmental justice frameworks to sustainability and environmental issues
- Evaluate the claims and structures that shape environmental justice movements and marginalized communities
- Critique the strategies and frameworks used to research environmental justice and inequalities
- Evaluate the roles of law, policy, and governance in creating environmental justice and addressing environmental inequality at different scales
- Formulate and communicate strategies linking research on environmental inequalities to concrete actions
Certificate requirements
The graduate certificate in Environmental Justice and Inequality requires the completion of three courses:
This course provides legal, policy and management tools to understand and advance environmental justice. The approach is interdisciplinary and includes analytical tools used in geography, environmental and public health, policy and law, and critical race theory. The course will expose students to the unique environmental vulnerabilities that marginalized communities are at heightened exposure to, including toxics siting, public health disparities and food access, while featuring pathways towards building sustainable and just societies.
This course examines environmental and social justice conflicts from a global/ international perspective. We discuss distributional justice issues of hazardous waste sites around the world and related procedural injustices in siting, operation, and human rights concerns. Through case studies and research, students analyze crucial processes and relations generating environmental inequalities at different scales, and investigate how economies’ extractive activities generate conflicts and resistance across the world. Learning activities include participating on a course discussion board, conducting interviews, engaging in media analyses, peer review, mini group projects, journal reflections, and a final presentation.
This graduate-level, seminar-style course focuses on how environmental inequalities are operationalized and measured in research and public policy contexts. Utilizing synchronous and asynchronous methods, this course reviews contributions by community-based and thought leaders; frameworks for structuring and maintaining community ties; and ethical considerations for working with indigenous and other historically colonized communities. It offers examples of operationalization with a focus on public health research.
All courses are offered online and designed to accommodate working professionals’ schedules. Course activities include readings, instructor-developed video presentations and podcasts, guided exercises, online discussions, and completion of class exercises toward a final project. Students regularly engage with the professor in online discussions, synchronous learning sessions, and phone or online office hours.
We understand flexibility is important.
If you’re not ready to commit to the full certificate program, you can enroll in just one course for now and take the others later by registering as a visiting student.
Faculty
Dr. Michael Mikulewicz
Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies
[email protected]
Michael is a critical geographer who studies the intersecting social, economic and political inequalities caused by the impacts of, and our responses to, climate change and other environmental issues. His current research is guided by the concepts of climate & environmental justice, adaptation, post-politics, resilience, urban sustainability, and intersectionality.
Michael is the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice and the forthcoming Climate Justice in the Majority World, an edited collection of research on climate equity by scholars from the Global South. He has published his work in Climate and Development, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Geoforum, Area, New Political Economy, The Lancet Planetary Health, among others. Michael obtained his PhD in Human Geography from the University of Manchester, UK. Before joining ESF, he worked at the Mary Robinson Centre for Climate Justice at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland.
Dr. Chie Togami
Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies
[email protected]
Chie is an environmental sociologist whose work lies at the intersection of social movements and critical environmental justice. She is particularly interested in climate change movements, gender, and equity in environmental remediation, with an emphasis on how power and inequality shape environmental governance and its outcomes.
Chie’s work has been published in Environmental Justice and Journal of Local Environment among other places. She is currently working on projects related to equity and lead service line replacement, transboundary hazardous waste, and funding for climate action. Chie completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh before joining ESF in Fall 2024.
Dr. Eun Kyung Lee
Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies
[email protected]
Dr. Lee is an environmental health scientist who focuses on health disparities research. Her work examines how neighborhood environments and policies shape patterns of chronic disease risk and mental health outcomes, particularly in communities facing racial and socioeconomic inequities. She studies both physical neighborhood environments (e.g., proximity to industrial facilities and access to healthy food, health care, and green space) and social factors (e.g., poverty, gentrification, and social capital), particularly in the context of historical redlining.
Eun Kyung’s work has been published in journals such as JAMA, Environmental Science & Technology, Social Science & Medicine, and Science of the Total Environment. Supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), her recent and ongoing research examines how climate-related hazards, such as urban heat, and industrial air pollution may jointly contribute to cardiovascular disease risk across different neighborhoods. Prior to joining ESF, she completed postdoctoral training at the Boston University School of Public Health and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Master of Professional Studies
Take your certificate to the next level:
Complete all three of ESF’s online graduate certificates — plus a capstone project — to earn a Master of Professional Studies (MPS) in Environmental Leadership, Justice, and Communication.
Contact us
Share some basic information below and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible.
