Chris Jadallah

Chris Jadallah is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice in Education at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies. His research agenda examines the social, cultural, and political dimensions of science and environmental education, with a specific focus on community-based and place-based learning environments. He works across a variety of socioecological contexts – from diversified farming systems to river restoration efforts – where he interrogates how issues of power, place, and participation structure and mediate opportunities for learning in service of socioecological transformation. Specifically, he leverages critical and sociocultural perspectives on learning and qualitative methods in his work with the goals of:

1. Creating and deepening opportunities for individuals and communities to contribute their knowledge, practices, and perspectives toward social and environmental justice.

2. Disrupting conventional hierarchies in environmental projects that privilege dominant forms of expertise over the local knowledge and practices found distributed within communities.

3. Making visible the relationships between broader systems of power and moment-to-moment processes of interaction and learning.

Central to Jadallah’s research is a commitment to community-engaged scholarship. This entails collaborating with community partners to simultaneously co-design, implement, and study initiatives that build capacity for more just and sustainable futures.