Join us for "Corporate Rail and Toxic Exposure" with Nicole Fabricant.

Fabricant teaches anthropology at Towson University. Her academic and activist work has transitioned from Latin America to US-based environmental justice. Her work focuses on distinct groups of people coming together to build movements for housing/environmental justice. She spent decades fighting alongside South Baltimore Community Land Trust and building a participatory action research class at Benjamin Franklin High School.

The product of this movement work was Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore (University of California Press, 2022), which examines the cumulative impacts of industrial stationary toxic facilities in South Baltimore. It follows a dynamic and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race- and class-based health disparities and inequality of industrial expansion. As a Baltimore resident and activist-scholar, Fabricant documents how these young organizers came to envision, design, and create a more just and sustainable future. Fighting to Breathe received the 2024 APLA book prize for best critical ethnography in political anthropology.