Exploring spatial and cultural discourses in environmental justice movements: A study of two communities

Environmental justice studies have recently seen a surge in cultural narratives that document the interconnections between cultural and environmental injustices. Although these narratives offer important insights about the politics of pollution, they rarely highlight how cultural resources are adopted as protest strategies by communities engaged in collective mobilization. In this paper, we propose a conceptual approach that examines how cultural resources are adopted and transmitted as tools of protests for community mobilization. We call our framework Cultural Justice Approach. The proposed framework allows us to examine how cultural resources or tools are used for environmental mobilization. Specifically, we identify three cultural justice tools - symbologies of place, historiographies of space, and social ties and community networks and apply the framework to the study of two environmental justice movements in Land Between the Rivers, Kentucky and Santa Rita-Born in Space, New Mexico.