Rayyaan Hector

I am a PhD Student and Berkeley Fellow, from the UK, in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I am a Black British geographer with my research set to focus on addressing questions of environmental (in)justice as a means to actively critique and reconfigure power relations. As such, I am eager to participate in a wider project of undoing, recovering, and reinventing political vocabularies and institutions to dismantle the enduring legacies of colonialism effervescing through extractivist logics, environmental racism, and the embodied knowledges of marginalised communities. In addressing specifically Black spaces designated as ‘sacrifice zones’ for extractivism and environmental violence, I ultimately seek to analyse the state and its violence in creating and (re)producing environmental injustice through racial capitalism.

Outside of my research, I plan on making the most out of the Californian sunshine by going on bike rides around the Bay, throwing around a frisbee in Ultimate, and getting stuck in at local community gardens.