Julian Agyeman

Julian Agyeman, Ph.D., FRSA, a pioneering environmental justice and sustainability advocate, offers the keynote address during Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances at Bates College at 9:30 a.m. Monday, Jan. 16, in the College Chapel, 275 College St.

Professor and chair of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, Agyeman is known as the co-originator with Robert D. Bullard and Bob Evans of “just sustainabilities,” a concept espousing the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, while living within the limits of supporting ecosystems.

His keynote address at Bates is titled The Dream Lives on: Towards a ‘Just’ Sustainability.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA), Agyeman’s expertise and research interests critically explore the complex and embedded relations between humans and the environment, whether mediated by institutions or social movement organizations, and their implications for public policy and planning, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity.

Professor and chair of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, Agyeman is the co-founder and co-editor of the international journal Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability. He has written more than 150 publications including the MIT Press books Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (2003); Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Former Soviet Union (2009); Environmental Inequalities Beyond Borders: Local Perspectives on Global Injustices (2011); and Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability (2011); and the New York University Press book Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice (2005).

Agyeman holds visiting appointments as affiliate professor in environmental justice and sustainability at the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia, Adelaide; and as visiting professor at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom.