The LSJ community is thrilled to be welcoming two new faculty members to our team this year. Morgan P. Vickers and Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis will be joining the Law, Societies, and Justice department as assistant professors, and will be leading courses focusing on their areas of expertise. Their diverse backgrounds and breadth of experience will no doubt be an incredible addition to the LSJ community.
Morgan P. Vickers
Morgan P. Vickers is an incoming Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization. Their research and teaching illuminate racialized ecologies, 20th-century infrastructure projects, the social construction of race, and eco-social repair. As such, their work is centrally concerned with how racialized populations and their environments have been historically defined using the same language of damnation, pestilence, and threat in order to destroy both through legal and extralegal maneuvers. Dr. Vickers will teach courses related to these themes, including Race, Law, and Justice; Reparations: Race, Recognition, and Remediation; and Infrastructures of Exclusion.
Dr. Vickers is currently working on a manuscript that examines the social, racial, and legal construction and transformation of swamplands in the American South. It aims to illuminate how centuries of environmental and racial myths are legitimized through American policy measures and infrastructural development projects that were designed to facilitate the simultaneous erasure of undesirable people and unruly ecologies.
Dr. Vickers received their Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where they were awarded research fellowships from the National Science Foundation, The Black Geographic, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, among others. Dr. Vickers has published articles in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and The Arrow Journal and has articles under review in Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice and American Anthropologist, as well as book chapters under review with Sage Publications and Rowman & Littlefield.
Dr. Vickers is thrilled to join the exciting, engaging, and thoughtful faculty, staff, and students of the Department of LSJ. During their visit, they were struck by the justice-oriented work and scholarship of faculty, the hands-on classroom environment, the generous questions and feedback of students, and the passion of everyone they met at the UW. Though Seattle and the PNW are new to Dr. Vickers, they are an avid runner and hiker and can't wait to explore all of the wonderful outdoor adventures Washington has to offer.
Check out more of Morgan’s work on their website here.
Sebastian Rubiano-Galvis
Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis is an incoming assistant professor of environmental justice. His work studies the political ecology of extraction and toxicity and the politics of environmental knowledge, technology, and law in Colombia and Latin America. He is interested in how science, technology, and law shape and are shaped by people’s relations with their environments and resources, especially in polluted and extractive landscapes. He draws on concepts from political ecology, science and technology studies, and global environmental politics and uses qualitative methods and interpretive analysis. Dr. Rubiano-Galvis will be teaching various courses on environmental justice and science, technology, and society. In the winter quarter, he will lead an introductory Environmental Justice course. In the spring quarter, he will teach a Science, Technology, and Justice course.
Rubiano-Galvis began his career as a human rights and environmental lawyer and socio-legal researcher in Colombia. After obtaining his law degree from the Universidad de Los Andes in 2011, he worked at the same institution as a lecturer in environmental law and researcher at the Center for Socio-Legal Research (CIJUS). He also researched social, economic, and cultural rights at the Center for the Study of Law, Society, and Justice (Dejusticia), a Colombia-based research and advocacy organization.
During the extractive boom of the early 2010s in Latin America, Rubiano-Galvis became interested in the role of the law in public controversies around mining, the expansion of extractive frontiers, and the law’s role in ordering space and territory. Instead of only using and teaching the law, he became increasingly curious about how it mediated nature and society relations. In 2014, he completed a master's in Geography at Los Andes with a thesis on the history and tensions over gold mining and conservation policies in the Colombian Amazon during the second half of the twentieth century. In 2022, he completed his PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley with a dissertation critically examining global legal and technoscientific efforts to phase out mercury use from non-licensed gold mining in Colombia and Latin America.
He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation as well as on a project on algorithmic environmental justice and the "datafication" of mining and environmental policy in Latin America. He is also concluding an edited volume on science and technology studies approaches to the law in Latin America, which Ediciones Uniandes will publish in November 2024.
Dr. Rubiano-Galvis came to UW after nine years in the San Francisco Bay Area, the last two as a postdoc and assistant professor at the University of San Francisco. Besides Seattle’s landscapes and location, LSJ’s intellectual tradition as a powerhouse of law and society studies was a significant incentive to come to UW. He says, “During my campus visit, I was impressed by the LSJ students I met with, so I look forward to working alongside students in my classes and research. In addition, UW’s various centers and institutes in my work areas provide promising collaboration opportunities for engaging in multidisciplinary and impactful cutting-edge research. I am already a faculty affiliate of the Center for Environmental Politics and the Science, Technology, and Society Studies Interdisciplinary Group. I also plan to connect with other academic units like the College of the Environment.”
For Dr. Rubiano-Galvis, environmental justice work could not be more urgent, especially in times of climate crisis and violence against land and environmental defenders. He thinks educators have a responsibility to help train the next generation of environmental justice advocates and instill in them a sense of hope and possibility. “We need deep, critical analyses of the roots of contemporary environmental problems and collective action and mobilization to address them just and equitably. LSJ is an exceptionally well-equipped program to train motivated professionals for this challenge I am stoked to have the opportunity to partake in that endeavor”, Dr. Rubiano-Galvis said. While his research and advocacy work has primarily focused on Colombia, Latin America, and the international sphere, Dr. Rubiano-Galvis plans to connect with and eventually collaborate with local environmental justice nonprofits, scholars, and practitioners in Seattle, Puget Sound, and the Pacific Northwest more broadly.
When not working, Dr. Rubiano-Galvis enjoys biking, hiking, and strolling with his dogs, Canela and Oso. Fun fact: Dr. Rubiano-Galvis is an advanced certified scuba diver and has dived in multiple sites in Honduras, the Philippines, and Colombia's insular regions in the Pacific and the Caribbean.
Check out more of Sebastián’s work at his website here.
Welcome, Morgan and Sebastián! We are so excited to have you as part of our LSJ community.