Research Area Spotlight: Environmental Justice

Gaiutra Bahadur is an Associate Professor of Journalism and English at Rutgers-Newark. She is the author of Coolie Woman, a history of indentured women shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize and Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in nonfiction. She is an essayist, critic, and reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among other publications. Her work has been selected as notable by the editors of Best American Essays 2024, and she has won literary residencies at MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. Born in Guyana and raised there and in New Jersey, she writes about empire, its afterlives, and its new incarnations—a focus that connects the two subjects of her current book project: migrants and rising seas, border-crossers both. A former daily newspaper staff writer, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 2007-2008 for her work covering immigration in the Philadelphia region, Texas politics, and the Iraq War. She later held research fellowships at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the NY Public Library, and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. In 2024, she served as the inaugural Ramesh and Leela Narain Fellow at the University of Cambridge and in 2025, she was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. 

Publications:

• "Is Guyana’s Oil a Blessing or a Curse?" (2024, March 30). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/headway/is-guyanas-oil-a-blessing-or-a-curse.htm

• "Geopolitics, in First Person." (2024, July 22). Nieman Reports. https://niemanreports.org/geopolitics-in-first-person

• Essay: "Unmaking Asian Exceptionalism," The Boston Review 48, no. 3 (Summer 2023): 114-129

• Book Review: “Two Divergent Girlhoods in Ghana, United by the Same Debt,” The New York Times Book Review (review of Peace Adzo Medie’s novel Nightbloom), July 30, 2023.

• "Tales of the Sea," The Griffith Review 59: Commonwealth Now (2018)

• "The  Stained Veil," short fiction,  in Go Home! (Feminist Press, 2018), ed. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.

• "Of Islands and Other Mothers," creative nonfiction, in Nonstop Metropolis (University of California Press, 2016), ed. Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.

• Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• The Things We Carried, Queen Mary University of London Public Lecture, 2025

• Gender, Caste, Diaspora, Barnard Center for Research on Women, November 9, 2023

• First Saturdays Book Reading, The Brooklyn Museum, March 4, 2023

• Inaugural Ramesh and Leela Narain Lecture, The University of Cambridge, July 27, 2023

Previous Organizations: 

• The Center for Worker Education, City College of New York, CUNY

• The University of Basel, Switzerland

• The Philadelphia Inquirer

Accomplishments:

• Visiting Fellow, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, 2025

• Fellowship: Inaugural Ramesh and Leela Narain Fellow, The University of Cambridge (the first fellowship globally devoted to the study of indenture)

• Notable Essay, Best American Essays 2024

• New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose, 2019 and 2013

• Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Upcoming Projects:

• At work on a book, tentatively titled The Americans, weaving together the actions and aspirations, the values and contradictions, of several groups of Americans deeply connected with my home country of Guyana in the 20th to early 21st centuries. They include radicals, spies, exiles, immigrants, and an oil giant. The details of their distinct trajectories challenge what the United States truly represents and the nature of American exceptionalism, both at home and abroad. The book draws connections between African and Asian diasporas in the West Indies and the United States and between migrants and rising seas, border crossers both.

How Do Social and Racial Justice Concerns Appear in Your Work?

As a writer of creative nonfiction, a journalist, and a humanities scholar, I tell the stories of migrants and place them in global historical, political, and ecological contexts, in the aftershocks of indenture, slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, and ongoing resource extraction.

ISGRJ Project: The Sawyer Seminar Series: Reparative and Restorative Paradigms for Environmental Justice Co-Leader

The Saywer Seminar Reparative and Restorative Paradigms for Environmental Justice, held at Rutgers University-Newark in April 2025, examined local and global perspectives on the existential challenges posed by climate change. It considered how reparative and restorative approaches to environmental justice may offer more inclusive opportunities to re-imagine the terms of citizenship and self-government; ones that embed the interconnectedness of humans and their ecology in culture, politics, and laws. Recent conversations about reparations in the United States have drawn on both history and analyses of current economic, social, and political perspectives to propose reparative practices that range from monetary compensation to targeted policies that address racial disparities in wealth, housing discrimination, and education access, among others. At a wider scale, scholars like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have offered a constructivist view of reparations that proposes a historically informed project of distributive justice that serves a larger and broader world-making process. The project of reparations, therefore, has a forward-facing orientation that by necessity is anchored in the past.

The Co-Leaders for the Reparative and Restorative Paradigms for Environmental Justice Seminar at Rutgers University-Newark

Rutgers University – Newark was awarded a grant by the Mellon Foundation to organize a Sawyer Seminar Series titled Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures. The Sawyer Seminar, led by ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado, co-organized by Lauren Shallish (Urban Education), and hosted at Rutgers-Newark during the 2024-2025 academic year, explored themes of social justice centering on four critical areas of inquiry: systemic racism, environmental crisis and climate change, disability, human displacement and post-conflict resolution. 

Learn more here. 

Priscilla Ferreira is an Afro-Brazilian feminist, abolitionist, and social justice educator. She is also an Assistant Professor of Geography and Latinx & Caribbean at Rutgers University- New Brunswick. Her work and activism focus on Black feminist mutual-aid economies in Brazil, Black co-op movements across the African Diaspora, urban Black geographies, and community-engaged methodologies and scholarship.  

She has been organizing with communities of color inside and outside of academia over the past twenty years and collaborated in several popular education projects internationally.  Dr. Ferreira is founder and the coordinator of the English & Social Justice School, a language justice Black co-op that offers language training, interpretation and translation services for social movements and creates opportunities for international education and political collaboration for/with Black grassroots activist, Black artists and scholars.  

Publications & Speaking Engagements

Publications:

• Ferreira, P; Santos, R. E. 2023. ‘Methodologies of Black Social Movements’ in Lovell, S. A., Coen, S. E., & Rosenberg, M. W. (Eds.). The Routledge handbook of methodologies in human geography. Taylor & Francis.

• Ferreira, P. (2022). My curls, my crown. In L. Wanzer (Ed.). Trauma, tresses and truth: untangling our hair through personal narratives. Chicago Review Press.

• Ferreira, P. (2021). Encounters in Black Feminist Geographies That Ache and Bond. WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 49(1), 137-160

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Mcgrann/USF Global Black Geographies Conference Chair- Keynote roundtable- Theorizing Global Black Geographies - Rutgers

• Popular education and the economics of abolition. The Inaugural Jack Quarter Lecturership in Social Economy. [Keynote Address] Jun, 2 2023. The Ontario Institute of Education (OISE). University of Toronto, Canada

• Black Brazilian Consciousness Day Abroad- Teacher's College Columbia University

Organizations/Accomplishments/Upcoming Projects

Previous Organizations:

• University of Texas- Austin

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Global Citizenship Experience High School and Educator Institute

Accomplishments:

• Postdoctoral Fellow in Black Studies and Latino Studies

• Urban Studies Foundation Knowledge Mobilization Award

• Rotary World Peace Fellow

Upcoming Projects:

• Ferreira, P.; Serafim, Ana Lucia, Tia Lucinha da Cidade de Deus(as):a biografia política de uma organizadora comunitária. Desalinho Publicacoes (“In press”). Series of launching activities

• Global Black Geographies Network

• Collaborate in building the framework to institute the National Association of Black Cooperators

How Do Social and Racial Justice Concerns Appear in Your Work?

I am an Afro-Brazilian feminist, abolitionist, and social justice educator. My work and activism focus on Black solidarity economies, Black geographies, and community-engaged pedagogies and scholarship. I have been been organizing with communities of color inside and outside of academia over the past twenty years and collaborated in several popular education projects internationally. I am the founder and the coordinator of the English & Social Justice School, a language justice Black co-op that offers language training, interpretation and translation services for social movements and creates opportunities for international education and political collaboration for/with Black grassroots activist/scholar/artists. I am a board member of Collective Diaspora, a new membership-based organization of Black cooperatives and Black-led co-op support organizations from across the African diaspora.

Sangita Pudasainee-Kapri is an Assistant Professor of Nursing at Rutgers University–Camden, with interdisciplinary expertise that bridges child development, public health, and nursing. She holds advanced certifications in global health and pediatric nursing, and is a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner. Dr. Pudasainee-Kapri brings a strong foundation in quantitative research methods, with particular expertise in analyzing large nationally representative datasets focused on children and families. 

As an interdisciplinary health scientist, Dr. Pudasaine-Kapri's research focuses on maternal and child health disparities and chronic illness management research among low-income and racially/ethnically minoritized families. She employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including advanced statistical modeling to investigate complex health challenges affecting vulnerable populations.

Building on her dissertation, the primary aim of Dr. Pudasainee-Kapri’s research is to examine the influence of social determinants of health and clinical factors on perinatal mental health and developmental outcomes among at-risk children—particularly those born preterm or with low birth weight—across global contexts. These studies seek to deepen understanding of the factors that shape perinatal mental health and infant outcomes, ultimately providing a foundation for targeted, evidence-based, and culturally tailored interventions. Her long-term goal is to reduce disparities in perinatal mental health and promote healthy child development, with implications for public health policy, clinical practice, and community-based programs. 

A second stream of Dr. Pudasainee-Kapri’s research builds on her Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) quality improvement project, which focused on implementing evidence-based asthma management guidelines in pediatric primary care. She has since expanded this work to examine asthma health disparities and self-management behaviors among low-income and minority children and adolescents—an area informed by over a decade of pediatric clinical experience and driven by her deep commitment to improving outcomes for underserved pediatric populations. Through her work with diverse children with asthma and their families, Dr. Pudasainee-Kapri has observed persistent unmet social needs and systemic barriers to care, including poor housing conditions, food insecurity, limited access to education, exposure to violence, and environmental factors—all of which significantly impact asthma control and overall health outcomes.

The common thread of her two research streams is improving maternal and child health both locally and globally. She is actively engaged in global health research and policy, aiming to inform equitable and culturally responsive health interventions across diverse populations. Her work has been published in high-impact nursing and interdisciplinary journals such as Nursing Outlook, Journal of School Health, Journal of Pediatric Nursing, Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, BMC Infectious Diseases, PLOS Global Health, and Infant Behavior and Development.

Dr. Pudasainee-Kapri has taught a range of courses across both undergraduate and graduate nursing programs at Rutgers University. In addition to her academic responsibilities and impactful service at Rutgers, she has made significant contributions at the regional, national, and international levels. Nationally, she served as President of the Nepalese American Nurses Association (NANA) from 2022 to 2024 and currently serves as an advisor to the organization. Internationally, she contributes as a volunteer Nurse Educator in Nepal through Health Volunteers Overseas, supporting global capacity building in nursing education, advancing the professional development of clinical nurses, and enhancing patient care and overall health outcomes. 

In recognition of her impactful community-engaged scholarship, exemplary teaching, and international leadership and service, Dr. Pudasainee-Kapri has received numerous prestigious honors, awards, and competitive fellowships at both national and international levels, along with multiple media mentions. Notable recognitions include: Early Career Faculty Fellow, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (2024–2025); New Jersey Institute for Nursing CARES Award Nominee (Research Category, 2025); NANA Exemplary Leadership Award (2025); Chancellor’s Award for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement (2024); Nurse Faculty Rising Star Award (2023); NIH/NIMHD Health Disparities Research Institute Scholar (2022); Strategic Poster Award for Interdisciplinary Research in Child Development (2022); and National Minority Quality Forum’s 40 Under 40 Leaders in Minority Health Award (2021), among others.

Publications & Speaking Engagements

Publications:

• Pudasainee-Kapri, S. (2025). Prevalence of low birth weight and its developmental vulnerability among
  infants in Nepal: A critical review of the literature and future recommendations. Journal of Nepal
  Medical Association, 63(287), 541-549. https://doi.org/10.31729/jnma.9112

• Pudasainee-Kapri, S., Li, Y., Kapri, K. P., Fu, M. R., Wiest, D., Kandel, P., & Hussain, M. J. (2025).
  Emergency department visits among children with asthma: Racial/ethnic disparities before and
  during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nursing outlook, 73(3), 102394. Advance online publication.
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2025.102394

• Pudasainee-Kapri, S., Shrestha, T., Wunnenberg, M., Kapri, K., Chapagai, M., & Chapagain, R. (2025).
  The association between low birthweight and postpartum depression: A cross-sectional multisite
  study among women within six months of postpartum. Journal of Nursing Practice Applications
  and Reviews of Research, 15 (1), 12-21. https://doi.org/10.13178/jnparr.2025.1501.1504

• Pudasainee-Kapri, S., Zhang Y., & Razza, R. (2025). Early bedtime routines and behavioral outcomes
  among children from low-income families: Mediating role of emotion regulation. Infant Behavior
  and Development, 78, (102027), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2025.102027

• Pudasainee-Kapri, S., Shrestha, T., Dahan, T., & Wunnenberg, M. (2024). Translation, validation, and factor structure of the Nepali version of postpartum bonding questionnaires (PBQ-N) among postpartum women in Nepal. PLOS Global Public Health, 4(7), e0003469-. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0003469

• Pudasainee-Kapri, S., Pontes, N. M. H., & Pontes, M. C. F. (2023). Sex Differences in the Relationship Between Asthma and Bullying Victimization Among High School Students in the United States. The Journal of School Health 93(11), 982–989. https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.13353

• Pudasainee-Kapri, S. (2022). Moderate low birth weight and socioemotional competence among children: The role of parenting factors in early childhood. Journal of Pediatric Nursing: Nursing Care of Children and Families, 64, 74-83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedn.2021.12.025. PMID: 35240492

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• June 2025: Panel presentation "Diverse Opportunities in Global Nursing Research Eastern Nursing Research Society (ENRS) and Global Health Research Interest Group.

• July 2024: Research Paper presented on Asthma Health Disparities and Asthma Control at Sigma International Nursing Research Conference in Singapore

• April 2024: Conference speaker on Clinical and social factors contributing to postpartum mental health among women at the Tenth Annual Summit of Health and Population Scientists in Nepal organized by Nepal Health Research Council.

• June 2023: Speaking about “Overview of the Nurse Practitioners Program and its Feasibility in Nepal” during virtual webinar organized by US-Nepal Policy Research Center

Organizations/Accomplishments/Upcoming Projects

Previous Organizations: 

• Jefferson Washington Township Hospital, Turnersville, NJ

• Children’s Regional Hospital at Cooper, Camden, NJ

• Syracuse University, NY

Accomplishments:

• 2025 Early Career and Racial Equity Program Cohort, Faculty Diversity Collaborative, Rutgers University

• 2025 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Engagement and Access for Research-Active Institutions
  (EARA) Pilot Program Cohort, NIH.

• 2025 Exemplary Leadership Award, Nepalese American Nurses Association

• 2024 Chancellor's Award for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement, Rutgers University–Camden

• 2024 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty Award, Rutgers School of Nursing-Camden

• 2022 Health Disparities Research Institute (HDRI) Scholar, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)

Upcoming Projects:

• Social and Clinical Determinants of Disparities in Perinatal Mental Health and Infant Outcomes at Birth and Within Six Months Postpartum In New Jersey

• Impact of Social Factors and Birth Weight on Mental Health, Self-Efficacy, and Parent-Infant Bonding among Postpartum Mothers in Nepal

• Factors Influencing Asthma Self-Management and Disparities in Asthma Control among Adolescents from Low-Income Minority Families

How Do Social and Racial Justice Concerns Appear in Your Work?

My research and teaching are deeply rooted in social and racial justice. In the classroom, I use inclusive language and create a space where students can practice empathy and cultural humility. My research focuses on the impacts of social determinanants of health,  environmental factors, and racial inequities in perinatal mental health, pediatric asthma, and child development. I use socioecological, environmental, and health equity frameworks to guide my work