Despite the snow and sub-freezing temperatures on Monday, Dr. Dorceta Taylor delivered SNRE’s annual MLK Lecture to a full house of faculty, students, and community members. The talk, entitled “Race, Poverty, and Access to Food in America: Resistance, Survival, and Sustainability,” followed the trajectory of much of Dr. Taylor’s environmental justice scholarship and teaching, using history as a lens to understanding present food disparities.
Dorceta Taylor is delivering the annual MLK Lecture at the School of Natural Resources and Environment as part of the school’s Dean's Speaker Series. Taylor is a professor of Environmental Justice at SNRE. She also is founder and director of the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, which aims to increase diversity in environmental organizations as well as the broader environmental movement. It also promotes greater diversity in leadership in the environmental field. Her lecture is titled "Race, Poverty, and Access to Food in America: Resistance, Survival, and Sustainability." It begins at 5 p.m. in Room 1040, Dana Building.
Researchers at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment are leading a five-year, $4 million study of disparities in access to healthy food across the state. The researchers will interview residents and study data in 18 small to mid-sized cities to better understand the factors affecting "food security," a socioeconomic term that defines easy access to safe and healthy food.
SNRE Professor Dorceta Taylor has received the HR Johnson Diversity Service Award. Taylor is a professor in the Environmental Justice field of study at SNRE and director of the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, a research and outreach center she founded and which is housed within the school. In 1992, she received a Rockefeller-Ford post-doctoral fellowship at Michigan's Poverty and the Underclass program. She joined SNRE in 1993 and is dually appointed with the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. In 2010, she was honored with the Outstanding Publication Award for Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change by the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.
Minority professionals have historically been underrepresented in major environmental organizations. A long-term study by SNRE Environmental Justice Professor Dorceta Taylor, published this winter in Environmental Practice, parses apart the stereotype that the field has been slow to diversify because minorities are generally disinterested in environmental careers.
SNRE Professor Dorceta Taylor has been named chair-elect of the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. The Section on Environment and Technology provides a home for about 460 sociologists interested in a range of environmental issues. Section members recently voted on new officers. Next year, Professor Taylor will become chair of the Section.
SNRE Associate Professor Dorceta E. Taylor has received the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. The award is for Taylor's 2009 book, "The environment and the people in American cities, 1600s-1900s: disorder, inequality, and social change," published by Duke University Press.