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 engagement, including 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?

Recent projects include a NASA funded project, with collaborators at Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, MIT, and the CSU Geospatial Centroid. We’re building a geospatial and storytelling digital platform that combines real-time and historical earth observation data on environmental hazards and burdens impacting carceral facilities with storytelling from incarcerated people who experienced these environmental hazards firsthand, providing a multi-method way of addressing environmental injustice in carceral landscapes. This work builds on my prior collaboration with Dr. Caitlin Mothes at the Centroid on a NASA funded project leveraging Earth Science data to characterize the environmental harms experienced at U.S. prisons.

In addition, I co-direct the Prison Agriculture Lab with Dr. Joshua Sbicca. Founded in 2019, the lab is a collaborative space for inquiry and action that links innovative research, science translation and storytelling, and public engagement committed to challenging inequities in the United States’s criminal punishment system. We examine prison agriculture not only as a practice central to the development and reproduction of the prison system, but also in its illumination of key prison conditions, including labor regimes, disciplinary management strategies, connections between ethnoracial, class, and gender hierarchies, and how incarcerated people resist inhumane conditions and carve out spaces of freedom in otherwise hostile environments. In this work, our lab has developed critical GIS mapping, data visualizations, prison satellite imaging, story mapping, zines, and educational resources, among other projects. Our work has recently been featured in the Edge Effects podcast series, Violent Environments, and in an investigative journalism series from the Associated Press. We've also published in magazines including The Nation and Mold.

My other current research projects include a mixed-methods participatory action research project in Dubuque Iowa, examining the intersecting political ecologies of food, land, and housing, and a community-engaged research project with advisee Reagan Ross in Newberry County, South Carolina, examing Black community members' food sharing practices.

Publications

Publications

Embodiment Lab, H. Abou Ali, J. Bryan, C. Chennault, D. Grover, M. Haghdadi, F. Bin Islam, N. Kim, N. Lucas, N. T. Mohana, L. Naylor, R. Nixon, K. M. Obringer, G. Ramsay, N. N. Sultana, K. Thakkar, and N. Thayer. 2025. Embodied belonging in the social science lab. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. 24 (1): 1-25. doi: 10.14288/acme.v24i1.2429. 

Chennault, C. and J. Sbicca. 2024. Abolition methodologies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. doi: 10.1177/02637758231193718.

Kaufman, E., C. Chennault, and H. Molana. 2024. Slow(ed) scholarship: On crip time and refusal from the intersections of privilege and precarity. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 23 (5): 379-401. doi: 10.14288/acme.v23i5.2326. 

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. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2157238

Chennault, C. and J. Sbicca. 2023. Prison agriculture in the United States: Racial capitalism and the disciplinary matrix of exploitation and rehabilitation. Agriculture and Human Values. 40, 175–191. doi: 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). doi: 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. doi: 10.31274/jctp-180810-85

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 doi: 10.31274/jctp-180810-61

Courses

  • GR 100: Introduction to Geography

  • GR 217: Human-Environment Geographies

  • GR 331: Geography of Food Systems

  • GR 592: Abolition Geographies