With registration for Winter quarter approaching, the LSJ team wanted to give the community some more insight on our two new faculty members, Morgan Vickers and Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis, who will be teaching courses in the LSJ department following the new year. This interview elaborates on their academic backgrounds, their various professional roles, their complex and innovative research projects, and their aspirations following both of these two new assistant professors moving to the Seattle area.

Morgan P. Vickers

“I had a professor when I was an undergraduate use the phrase ‘dig where you stand’…the idea is that we can always learn about histories all around the world, but it is really useful and practical and important to think about the histories that are happening in our own backyard.”

Morgan P. Vickers, one of our new faculty members, joins the LSJ department with the unique perspective of a geographer who has an intentional focus on placemaking and spatialization. Prior to starting at the University of Washington, Morgan completed their graduate program at UC Berkeley in the geography department. They had the opportunity to TA for and teach a variety of classes during their time there, including a class Morgan designed titled “World Peoples in Cultural Environments.” This class focused on place-making and environmental justice class which are some of the themes they hope to bring into their new courses at the UW.

In addition to starting as an assistant professor at the UW, Morgan is a content editor at Environmental History Now, whose mission is to make environmental histories both more accessible to audiences that are historically underrepresented and to amplify underrepresented voices to illuminate their stories. Alongside this, Morgan is an executive board member of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. This group, which was founded less than a decade ago, works to advocate for Black scholars, encourage the inclusion of Black theories and methodologies in the field of geography, and invite people to think critically about Black lives within this field of geography. As a Black geographer and scholar, Morgan studies Black life and helps with communication to strengthen this messaging and bring more people into the organization.

Beyond these roles, Morgan has been working on their manuscript that builds upon their dissertation that they wrote as an undergrad. A working title Morgan has created for this piece is titled Black Dam/Nation, and focuses on the simultaneous social, political, legal maneuvers to suppress, and in this case submerge, Black lives, Black ecologies, and the spaces that Black people inhabit. Morgan has conducted a lot of field work in South Carolina, alongside gathering research from the national archives in DC and New York. They aim to formally publish this book within the next 5 years.

Centered around the developing concept of the racialization of swamplands, Morgan hopes to put together a symposium and local events for UW folks who are interested in swamplands, wetlands, racialization, and all of these complex themes. They also hope to lead a study abroad program, maybe in Singapore, because of the country’s focus on infrastructural development, multicultural history, and diverse racial interactions.

When registering this upcoming week, keep an eye out for two new courses being taught by Morgan winter quarter 2025: One course titled “Race, Law, and Justice” is a 300 level class which will focus on court cases and incidents throughout history, in order to understand how race is socially and legally constructed. The second course Morgan will be teaching is a 400 level course titled “Reparations” and will focus on the legal processes of reparations, the different forms of reparations, and environmental repair.

Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis

“I feel like I started my career with a very optimistic and enthusiastic stance on the law and what it can do to deliver justice, especially in the context of inequality and violence, such as the one where I'm from and where I worked at the beginning of my career. But throughout the years, I started to develop a much more critical view towards the law. I became more interested in questions such as, who does the law serve? Who benefits from environmental laws? What ideas of nature are enshrined in environmental laws, and what does that mean for people's relationship with the environment?”

New LSJ faculty member Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis comes into the department with a background in environmental justice. Originally from Bogota, Colombia, Sebastián studied law at the Universidad de los Andes School of Law in Bogota where he also completed his Masters in geography. He taught an environmental law course for law students for about five years prior to migrating to the United States in 2015. He then received his PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, & Management from UC Berkeley. Sebastián came to UW after nine years in the Bay Area, the last two as a postdoc and assistant professor at the University of San Francisco.

Learning about law in action as opposed to law in books, Sebastián became interested in the distributive dimension of the law. He examined the case of mining and environmental policies, through the lens of the extracting boom that characterized Latin America in the 2010s and the global south more broadly.

Utilizing his dissertation, Sebastián is working on his book which is a critical history of the global efforts to phase out Mercury use from artisanal gold mining in the Global South, specifically in Latin America and Colombia. This book will critically reflect on the effectiveness of the UN Minamata convention that was signed in 2013 to phase out Mercury use, but it's also an analysis of this assumption that environmental problems persist because people, in this case artisanal miners in the Global South, don't understand technology or that they are wary of using mercury free technologies. He contends that this is problematic because it masks the structural causes of the problem and the reasons why it has been difficult to convince miners to stop using mercury being the colonial uses of mercury. At this time, the provisional title for Sebastián’s book is “Amalgamated injustice: a political ecology of gold and mercury in Colombia.”