Jennifer Nash

Re-thinking Intersectionality

Intersectionality has become the primary analytic tool that feminist and anti-racist scholars deploy for theorizing identity and oppression. This paper exposes and critically interrogates the assumptions underpinning intersectionality by focusing on four tensions within intersectionality scholarship: the lack of a defined intersectional methodology; the use of black women as quintessential intersectional subjects; the vague definition of intersectionality; and the empirical validity of intersectionality. Ultimately, my project does not seek to undermine intersectionality; instead, I encourage both feminist and anti-racist scholars to grapple with intersectionalitys theoretical, political, and methodological murkiness to construct a more complex way of theorizing identity and oppression.

Risks and Risk Governance in Unconventional Shale Gas Development

A broad assessment is provided of the current state of knowledge regarding the risks associated with shale gas development and their governance. For the principal domains of risk, we identify observed and potential hazards and promising mitigation options to address them, characterizing current knowledge and research needs. Important unresolved research questions are identified for each area of risk; however, certain domains exhibit especially acute deficits of knowledge and attention, including integrated studies of public health, ecosystems, air quality, socioeconomic impacts on communities, and climate change. For these, current research and analysis are insufficient to either confirm or preclude important impacts. The rapidly evolving landscape of shale gas governance in the U.S. is also assessed, noting challenges and opportunities associated with the current decentralized (state-focused) system of regulation. We briefly review emerging approaches to shale gas governance in other nations, and consider new governance initiatives and options in the U.S. involving voluntary industry certification, comprehensive development plans, financial instruments, and possible future federal roles. In order to encompass the multiple relevant disciplines, address the complexities of the evolving shale gas system and reduce the many key uncertainties needed for improved management, a coordinated multiagency federal research effort will need to be implemented.

Standard or Smokescreen? Implementation of a Voluntary Environmental Code

According to classical free market doctrine, no more should be expected of a business, even a large business, than that it operate within the law, and the law should protect the autonomy and rationality of the enterprise. After all, it is argued, a firm is the very model of instrumental rationality. However, the social costs of moral indifference—distorted priorities, defrauded consumers, degraded environments, deformed babies—have created an irrepressible demand for enhanced accountability, more external regulation, and a stronger sense of social responsibility.

Extended Producer Responsibility in the United States

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach that requires manufacturers to finance the costs of recycling or safely disposing of products consumers no longer want. This article describes the evolution of EPR policies in the United States, focusing on the role of states as policy actors. For their part, federal lawmakers have not embraced EPR policies except to remove some barriers to state‐level initiatives. In the two‐decade period from 1991 to 2011, U.S. states enacted more than 70 EPR laws. In addition, manufacturers have implemented voluntary programs to collect and recycle products, but those efforts have proven largely ineffective in capturing significant quantities of waste products. With the help of new coalitions of diverse interest groups, recently states have renewed efforts to establish effective EPR programs, enacting 40 laws in the period 2008–2011. Several state initiatives suggest a more promising future for EPR.

Feminist originalism: Intersectionality and the politics of reading

This article examines the growing body of commemorative feminist work on intersectionality – the myriad journals and books that have marked intersectionality’s twentieth anniversary and celebrated the analytic’s field-defining status and cross-disciplinary circulation. I argue that this commemorative scholarship is marked by its own genre conventions, including the emergence of originalism, an investment in returning to the ‘inaugural’ intersectional texts – namely Crenshaw’s two articles (1989, 1991) – and assessing later feminist work on intersectionality by its fidelity to those texts. The article reveals that intersectional originalism is its own practice of re-reading and re-interpretation that has its own complex temporal and racial politics, and which is animated by a desire to rescue intersectionality from critique in a moment in which identity politics are increasingly suspect.

Institutionalizing the Margins

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2391333

Bolstering Private Environmental Management

A new approach to environmental policy advocated by state agencies and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is to create “tracks” of environmental performance. The philosophy behind performance track programs is simple: distinguish strong environmental performers from weak ones and give strong firms special recognition and rewards such as enforcement forbearance and flexibility. The implementation of an environmental management system, or EMS, is one criterion agencies are using to determine which companies deserve special treatment. In this paper, the authors raise questions about whether the mere presence of an EMS is an appropriate metric for differentiating among firms. Policymakers should bear in mind that the EMS tool by itself is not necessarily sufficient for firms to create superior environmental improvement. Improvements may depend much more on how effectively and ambitiously an EMS is implemented, how well the organization is managed overall, and how committed the managers are to seeing that the firm achieves real and continuous improvement. These factors will always be harder for public agencies to assess. Reduced regulatory oversight may actually weaken the EMSs that firms implement, because incentives for using EMSs aggressively to achieve positive outcomes may be reduced. An agency mandate for broad EMS adoption might lead to a variety of responses from firms, including the adoption of systems with trivial environmental goals. Instead, policymakers should consider providing technical assistance to firms interested in EMS implementation and recognizing EMS firms with certificates of participation, product labeling, or government-sponsored publicity.

The Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Act: a model for nanomaterials regulation?

Nanomaterials exemplify a new class of emerging technologies that have significant economic and social value, pose uncertain health and environmental risks, and are entering the marketplace at a rapid pace. Effective regimes for regulating emerging technologies generate information about known or suspected hazards and draw on private sector expertise to guide managers’ behavior toward risk reduction, even in the absence of clear evidence of harm. This paper considers the extent to which the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) accomplishes those objectives. It offers the approach of the Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA) as a possible supplement to TSCA, filling gaps in agency knowledge and private sector capacities. TURA is notable for its focus on chemicals use and hazard and its emphasis on strengthening firms’ internal management systems. Given the current deadlock in Congressional efforts to modernize federal laws such as TSCA, the role of state laws like TURA merit attention. Absent definitive information about risk, a governance strategy that generates information and focuses management attention on reducing hazards is worth considering.

Unwidowing: Rachel Jeantel, Black Death, and the “Problem” of Black Intimacy

This article focuses on Rachel Jeantel’s testimony during the highly publicized George Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman was prosecuted on charges of second-degree murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, of which he was acquitted in July 2013. I treat Jeantel’s testimony as an act of what Sharon Holland terms “raising the dead” and as a form of black intimacy. In naming Jeantel’s testimony a practice of black intimacy, I am highlighting the ways in which it has become ordinary for black women—as wives, lovers, daughters, and mothers—to become mediums through which slain black men are allowed to speak, mediums who make visible black male pain, suffering, and disposability. I am also underscoring the ways that black intimacies are enacted, enjoyed, and staged in the face of black perishment in an ongoing moment where black bodies are relegated to what Holland calls the “space of death,” whether that space is the material death of bodies like Martin’s, what Lisa Cacho calls the “social death” of persistent devaluation, or the “civic death” of incarceration and criminalization, as Loïc Wacquant writes. The article then asks how and why Jeantel’s intimate act of raising the dead did not allow her access to a privileged class of black women: civil rights widows. Why, this article asks, wouldn’t Jeantel be interpellated as a kind of contemporary civil rights widow, particularly since the media so often insisted on describing her as Martin’s girlfriend? In what ways was her potential widow status undone or unmade? And what was the role of the legal proceeding in this unwidowing?

Motivating Without Mandates: The Role of Voluntary Programs in Environmental Governance

For the last several decades, governments around the world have tried to use so-called voluntary programs to motivate private firms to act proactively to protect the environment. Unlike conventional environmental regulation, voluntary programs offer businesses flexibility to adopt cost-effective measures to reduce environmental impacts. Rather than prodding firms to act through threats of enforcement, they aim to entice firms to move forward by offering various kinds of positive incentives, ranging from public recognition to limited forms of regulatory relief. Despite the theoretical appeal of voluntary programs, their proper role in government’s environmental toolkit depends on the empirical evidence of how these programs work in practice. This paper offers a comprehensive empirical overview of voluntary programs’ design and impact. It shows that not all voluntary programs are the same. Rates of business participation in voluntary programs depend on a variety of factors, including both how these programs are designed as well as, importantly, what kinds of relevant background regulatory threats may loom for business. Although governments and policy advocates sometimes urge voluntary programs as a substitute for conventional government regulation, it appears that the most effective voluntary programs depend on a robust backdrop of community pressure and regulatory threats. Studies that find these programs yield statistically discernible effects on firm behavior generally find only substantively small impacts, suggesting that at best voluntary programs can serve as a modest supplement to government regulation.