Hi, I’m Dr. Faiver-Serna and I am a first-gen Chicana mother-scholar. I grew up in a Mexican American household and was encouraged from an early age to explore higher education as a liberatory path, not only for myself, but for my family, my community, and those who come after me. I have my Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in Geography, a Masters of Public Health in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and a Bachelor of Arts in Latina/o Studies in the Department of American Culture from the University of Michigan. I am currently a Postdoctoral Diversity and Innovation Scholar, and am incoming Assistant Professor, at the University of New Hampshire in the Departments of Geography and Women and Gender Studies, on N’dakinna, the traditional ancestral homeland of the Abenaki, Pennacook, and Wabanaki Peoples present and since time immemorial. In my teaching, research, and writing I practice an anti-racist, Chicana feminist praxis firmly committed to the idea that individual liberation is only possible through collective liberation.

In my research I am interested the multi-scalar tensions between the causes of environmental degradation, its effects on human health, and racial and gender injustice. My current research centers on the labor of promotoras de salud, community health workers, who work in Long Beach, California to educate families about the risks of air pollution and asthma, particularly for young children most affected by the toxic particulate air pollution caused by the global goods movement through the Port of Long Beach. Environmental mitigation efforts in Long Beach depend on the underpaid labor of promotoras, whose commitment to their communities enacts environmental justice within geographies of environmental racism.

As both a researcher and teacher, I am invested in collaborative intellectual projects that disrupt hegemonic knowledge formations in the academy and beyond it. I am a founding member of the Critical Race Lab at the University of Oregon, directed by Laura Pulido. The CRL is a collective of anti-racist and decolonial scholar-activists. I am also a founding member of the American Association of Geographers Latinx Geographies Specialty Group, and currently serve as the Secretary-Treasurer.

My writing and collaborative research has been published in Society and Space Magazine, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and The Professional Geographer. I also have a chapter geared toward an undergraduate and wider audience, produced from my dissertation research about public health and environmental justice, in Lessons on Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, edited by Michael Mascahrenas (2021). I have forthcoming works in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, among other upcoming projects.