Teaching for both Geography and Urban Studies and Planning, Dr. Slocum teaches courses on environmental change and cities. She draws inspiration from abolitionist geography, critical nature- society studies, and feminist thought and practice, assigning readings from these literatures and seeking to challenge her students with their ideas.
She received her BA from McGill University in Political Science before serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger. She then worked in development policy advocacy for several years before pursuing an MA in International Development and Social Change at Clark University. A Fulbright scholarship to study women’s access to land in Mali’s Office du Niger rice project was the basis of her thesis. Drawing on feminist theory, science and technology studies, political ecology and critical development scholarship, she found that the emphasis on increasing rice production made it more difficult for women to ensure their traditional use rights were granted. This undermined women’s ability to retain autonomy and led to creative methods to gain temporary access. With colleagues, she published Power, process and participation: tools for change, responding to the absence of a power- oriented analysis in approaches like Participatory Rural Appraisal.
Dr. Slocum went on to pursue a doctorate in Geography, also at Clark University. Her dissertation research shifted to US municipalities and their early efforts to address climate change. In the late ‘90s, there was no climate movement, much less a climate justice movement, and the US was still debating the existence of climate change. Municipal staff were limited to promoting energy efficiency to ‘consumers’ and struggled to make climate change relevant at the city-scale. After publishing on this research, she moved on to what has become her long-term interest: the question of race and efforts to confront racism. Dr. Slocum has published on the US local food movement, whiteness, and anti-racism drawing on the literatures of critical food studies and race. The local food movement of the early ‘00s was predominantly white and middle class, drawing on white middle class imaginaries about farming, ‘good’ food, ‘healthy’ habits, and the value of the local while making dense white spaces in farmers’ markets, movement conferences, coops, and community supported agriculture. Among other work, she co-edited Geographies of race and food: fields, bodies, markets. Currently, she is a volunteer with Climate Jobs, a committee of Jobs with Justice PDX and from this and other activist experience, Dr. Slocum published on climate justice organizing in Oregon and Washington. In her appraisal of efforts in support of carbon pricing, she argued that climate justice has done the important work of focusing attention on the way structural racism shapes liberal efforts to make change. Yet emerging from environmental justice nonprofits, she also found that the movement privileged the role of NGOs but not the state, lacked an analysis of the relationship between class and race, and did not question racial capitalism’s role in creating those revenues subject to carbon pricing and redistribution. She proposed that climate justice embrace a more expansive understanding of the ‘frontline’ to include the white impoverished, and to recognize the need for state planning as envisioned by the Green New Deal.