LSA DEI x Sustainability Summit: For People + Planet

Shalanda H. Baker is the inaugural Vice Provost for Sustainability and Climate Action at the University of Michigan and a globally recognized scholar of energy justice. Before joining the University of Michigan, Shalanda served as the Senate-confirmed Director of the Office of Energy Justice and Equity, Secretarial Advisor on Equity, and Chief Diversity Officer at the United States Department of Energy. At the Department, she served as the architect of theagency’s equity and justice efforts. Prior to that, she served in the Biden-Harris Administrationas the nation’s first Deputy Director for Energy Justice.

She has spent over a decade conducting research on the equity dimensions of the global transition away from fossil fuel energy to cleaner energy resources. Before joining the Biden-Harris Administration, Shalanda was a Professor of Law, Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, where she taught courses on renewable energy law, energy policy, and the energy transition. While at Northeastern, Shalanda also co-founded and co-directed the Initiative for Energy Justice (www.iejusa.org), an organization committed to providing technicallaw and policy support to communities on the frontlines of climate change. Ms. Baker has also served as an associate professor of law at the University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law, where she was the founding director of the Energy Justice Program. Prior to that, she served on the faculty at the University of San Francisco School of Law.

Shalanda holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science from the United States Air Force Academy, a Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law, and an LLM from the University of Wisconsin School of Law, where she also served as a William H. Hastie Fellow. She has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and essays on renewable energy law, energy policy, and international development. In 2015, she was awarded a 2016-17 Fulbright-García Robles grant to explore Mexico’s energy reform, climate change, and indigenous rights. Her book, Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition, argues that energy policy is the next domain to advance civil rights (Island Press 2021).

Ms. Baker is a former Air Force officer and, prior to joining the legal academy, she worked as a corporate and project finance attorney in Boston and Tokyo.

Samantha L. Adams is a Doctoral Candidate in English and Women’s and Gender Studies at theUniversity of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she is the current James A. Winn Graduate Fellow atthe Institute for the Humanities. Her research lies at the intersections between African AmericanLiterature, Ecocriticism, Black Feminisms, and Black Studies. Her dissertation focuses on theliterary and historical relationships between Black subjects and bodies of water beyond theAtlantic Ocean.

Bénédicte Boisseron is Professor and Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) at The University of Michigan. Her interdisciplinary research brings into conversation Global Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, Critical Animal Studies, and Environmental Humanities. Her first book, Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (University Press of Florida, 2014) received awards from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Caribbean Studies Association. Her second book, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (Columbia University Press, 2018), draws on current debates about black life and animal rights in the history and cultures of the Americas and the Black Atlantic. Her current book project on Black freeganism was supported by a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship and she is also at work on a short book (Living with Dogs) under contract with Duke University Press. She is the Principal Investigator of the DAAS Black Ecologies project funded by the Mellon Foundation and is currently teaching a course on Black Ecologies (AAS 498).

David Temin is a political theorist whose research and teaching spans American political thought, Native American studies and politics, comparative and global political thought, and postcolonial and critical race studies. His research explores how the diverse strands of anticolonial thought help to reconsider central dilemmas of social and environmental justice in empire’s wake, as well as refashioning political concepts such as sovereignty and land. Temin's first book, Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2023), bridges political-intellectual history and conceptual analysis to show how key 20th-century Indigenous intellectuals and activists in lands today claimed by Canada and the United States reshaped the philosophical substance and normative goals of “decolonization.” The book traces how these conceptual moves and practical efforts to enact decolonization hinged on heavily debated projects of disentangling self-determination from the sovereign state, the restitution of dispossessed land, autonomy and safety for Indigenous women, and care-based duties of ecological stewardship. Remapping Sovereignty won the "Best First Book Award" (2024) from APSA's Foundations of Political Theory section. Temin has also published research in venues such as Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly, Constellations, and European Journal of Political Theory. He is currently working on a second book, entitled "Wages for Earthwork," in which he argues for the centrality of ecological labor to anticolonial climate justice politics.