Laura Pulido is the Collins Chair and Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Geography at the University of Oregon where she studies race, environmental justice, and cultural memory. Prior to moving to Oregon she taught at the University of Southern California for over 20 years. She has published six books, including Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (University of Arizona, 1996); Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California, 2006); A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng) (University of California, 2012), and most recently she worked with Jordan Camp to posthumously complete Clyde Woods’s, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restoration in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia, 2017). She has received numerous honors, including the Cullum Geographical Medal from the American Geographical Society, the Presidential Achievement Award from the Association of American Geographers, as well as Ford and Guggenheim fellowships. Her current work on landscapes of historical commemoration is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Most of her research explores the relationship between race, place, and social and environmental processes. She has devoted much of her career to studying environmental racism, especially how racism is conceptualized and operationalized in the scholarship and practice of environmental justice. Most recently, she has been studying how white supremacy and white nationalism impact climate denial and refusal. She is a co-organizer of the Just Futures Institute at the University of Oregon, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, which focuses on racial and environmental justice in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. In addition to her work on environmental justice, she has been studying the role of cultural memory in the U.S. white nation. Currently she is working with the InfoGraphics Lab at the University of Oregon to produce a thematic atlas entitled, Monumental Denial: U.S. Cultural Memory and White Innocence.
As part of her scholarship, Laura is deeply committed to public scholarship and popular education. Her book, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, a radical tour guide that documents sites of racial, class, gender, and environmental struggle in the history and landscape of Los Angeles, is now a book series (University of California Press) which she co-edits it with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng.
Awards
Distinguished Scholarship Honors; Harold Rose Anti-Racism Award; Presidential Achievement Award; Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography; Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Geography, American Association of Geographers; Cullum Geographical Medal, American Geographical Society; Guggenheim Fellowship.