Assistant Professor

About

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Anthropology and Geography at Colorado State University. My work as a feminist geographer examines the political ecologies of US inequalities through three interconnected themes: anti-racism and Black geographies; food, agricultural, and environmental justice; and transforming community relations engagement in the US and at land-grant universities.

Feminist and Black geographies take an intersectional approach to the study of space, place, and power: conceptualizing race and gender as interlocking, place-specific processes through which unequal spaces are organized, understood, and experienced. While charting complex terrains of exclusion, Black geographies illuminate collective struggles for place-making, Black life, and the creation of alternative imaginaries. It is within this burgeoning area of critical human geography that I situate my work. Due in no small part to the history of US land-grant universities, the study of food and agriculture from a feminist and Black geographic lens remains underexplored. Positioning myself at this convergence, my research pursues the following three questions:

How are food, agriculture, and the environment implicated in displacement and dispossession?
How are they implicated in everyday struggles for collective life and place?
What do feminist, Black, and queer knowledges have to offer in shaping food, agriculture, and human-environmental relations more broadly?

My current projects include a mixed-methods participatory action research project in Dubuque Iowa, examining the intersecting political ecologies of food, land, and housing.  I am also co-director of the CSU Prison Agriculture Lab, which investigates prison labor in plant, animal, and food production in US state-operated prisons through the lens of racial capitalism and abolition geographies. In this work, our lab collaborates directly with the CSU Geospatial Centroid on critical GIS mapping, prison satellite imaging, and storymapping projects. Our work has recently been featured in the Edge Effects podcast series, Violent Environments. In addition, I'm currently collaborating with Dr. Caitlin Mothes on a NASA Equity & Environmental Justice funded project leveraging Earth Science data to characterize the environmental harms experienced at U.S. prisons.

Publications

Publications

Chennault, C. and L. Sutton. 2023. At Home: Black Women’s Collective Claims to Environmentally Just Rental Housing. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 10.1080/24694452.2022.2157238

Chennault, C. and J. Sbicca. 2022. Prison agriculture in the United States: Racial capitalism and the disciplinary matrix of exploitation and rehabilitation. Agriculture and Human Values. 40, 175–191. 10.1007/s10460-022-10346-x

Chennault, C. 2022. Relational life: Lessons from Black feminism on whiteness and engaging new food activism. Antipode, 54(2) https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12775

Chennault, C. 2021. The path to radical vulnerability: Feminist praxis and community food collaborations. In B. Gökarıksel, M. Hawkins, C. Neubert & S. Smith (Eds.), Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies & Prefigured Futures. In J. Fluri & A. Trauger (Eds.), Gender, Feminism, and Geography Book Series. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. https://wvupressonline.com/node/863

Chennault, C., R. Valek, L. Schulte, and J. Tyndall. 2020. PEWI: An interactive web-based ecosystem service model for a broad public audience. Ecological Modelling, 431. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2020.109165.

Chennault, C., L. Klavitter, and L. Sutton. 2019. Visceral encounters in community gardens: A political ecology of urban food, land, and housing in Dubuque, Iowa. Social Sciences, 8(4), 122. doi: 10.3390/socsci8040122.

Carter, A., C. Chennault, and A. Kruzic. 2018. Public action for public science: Re-imagining the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 29(1), 69-88. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2017.1423364.

Dankbar, H., E. Zimmerman, C. Chennault, A. Basche, J. Nester, M. Pierre, and G. Roesch-McNally. 2017. Lettuce learn: Student reflections on building and sustaining a community donation garden. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 6(3), Article 5. https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jctp/article/id/533/

Chennault, C., L. Schulte, and J. Tyndall. 2016. PEWI: A web-based learning tool for evaluating ecosystem service tradeoffs from watersheds. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 71(2), 31A-36A. doi:10.2489/jswc.71.2.31A.

Huang, S., G. Hu, C. Chennault, L. Su, E. Brandes, E. Heaton, L. Schulte, L. Wang, and J. Tyndall. 2016. An Agent-based simulation model of farmer decision making on bioenergy crop adoption. Energy, 115(1), 1188-1201. doi:
10.1016/j.energy.2016.09.084.

Bullard, R., M. Gardezi, C. Chennault, H. Dankbar. 2016. Climate change and environmental justice: A conversation with Dr. Robert Bullard. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 5(2), Article 3 https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jctp/article/id/566/

Courses

  • GR 100: Introduction to Geography

  • GR 217: Human-Environment Geographies