Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental Justice

Abstract: Over the last decade the scope of the socio‐environmental concerns included within an environmental justice framing has broadened and theoretical understandings of what defines and constitutes environmental injustice have diversified. This paper argues that this substantive and theoretical pluralism has implications for geographical inquiry and analysis, meaning that multiple forms of spatiality are entering our understanding of what it is that substantiates claims of environmental injustice in different contexts. In this light the simple geographies and spatial forms evident in much “first‐generation” environmental justice research are proving insufficient. Instead a richer, multidimensional…