Making a Difference: Katie Cox
Katie Cox always knew she would work at the intersections of public health, science, social justice, and anthropology, and her current research on environmental justice and community air monitoring in Southern California has enabled her to explore those connections. She is a key member of a new team of AirUCI faculty and researchers who are working with a local environmental justice non-profit group (Madison Park Neighborhood Association) to measure and analyze air pollution particles in Orange County.
Katie has been working closely in partnership with the Madison Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA) in Santa Ana for the last three years as they have developed and implemented a community air monitoring project in their neighborhood, using resident-led environmental education and science to support their advocacy for environmental justice in the city. Her work with this group ultimately led to the partnership with the AirUCI faculty involved in this study and expanded AirUCI's research interests in the area of environmental justice.
Prior to pursuing her Ph.D in Anthropology (Fortun group), Katie worked at a migrant farmworker health clinic and a reproductive health clinic. She was drawn to Anthropology because it is a discipline that asked and answered questions about both larger structural issues as well as the everyday experiences that shaped the lives of her clients.
40 years into the United States environmental justice movement, Katie's research examines how EJ is conceptualized and put into practice in environmental activism, science, and policy. In particular, she studies community air monitoring initiatives in communities across Southern California. Her work is showing that, while the tools used to map environmental justice are useful and important, they are also limited as a framework for understanding the social and historical roots of pollution, environmental racism, and social inequality. Katie focuses on how the conditions that create the "disadvantaged community" are produced across multiple places and times in history.
In 2019 Katie received UCI's "Most Promising Future Faculty Award" and she is a Senior Pedagogical Fellow at UCI's Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI). This program has been used as a model for the campuswide DTEI Summer Graduate Fellows Program, in which grad student fellows are working with faculty mentors on collaborative course design during the pandemic. She has also been deeply involved in undergraduate education issues at UCI. With Professor Angela Jenks, she created the Teaching Together Learning Community in the School of Social Sciences, a program fostering faculty/TA collaboration on undergraduate pedagogical development, and she has been co-coordinating this Teaching Together program for the last two years.
In addition to hiking with her dog Olive, Katie loves cooking and karaoke. She is without doubt a dedicated voice in environmental activism, science, and policy.
