ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on cultural studies approaches to environmental justice activism and research. It brings together theories and methodologies from cultural studies to frame environmental justice as a mode of "storytelling" that performs and communicates what it means to live with environmental injury. Storytelling involves the enactment of "cultural methodologies", which include fictional, non-fictional, autobiographical, testimonial, and scientific accounts of environmental injustice. Environmental justice "stories" are narrated and enacted through different types of cultural media, including: film, documentary film, poetry, plays, novels, graphic novels, social activist media, place-based tours and walks, public commemoration and participatory citizen science projects. The ideological construction of environment as pure and undefiled nature in mainstream environmental culture privileges the concept of wilderness. With its focus on the lived experiences, histories and places of marginalized peoples and communities, environmental justice activism resituates the environment as the place where "people live, work, play and pray".
