Michael Méndez is assistant professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine, and visiting scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (through a National Science Foundation Early Faculty Career Award). Previously, he was the Pinchot Faculty Fellow in Sustainability Studies at the Yale School of the Environment.
Méndez has more than a decade of senior-level experience in the public and private sectors, where he consulted and actively engaged in the policymaking process. His first book, Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement (Yale University Press, 2020), is an urgent and timely story of the contentious politics of incorporating environmental justice into global climate change policy. The book won both the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award, sponsored by the International Studies Association, and the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Award of the Association for Humanist Sociology.
His project, “Undocumented Disasters: (In)visible Communities Confronting Climate Change and Environmental Injustice,” investigates how climate-induced disasters intensify social inequities among undocumented Latino/a and Indigenous migrants.
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