Indigenous Ocean Justice: Opening Keynote with Dr. Kelsey Leonard

Just Ocean and Coastal Futures Conference convenes future-oriented scholars who integrate reparative frameworks into coastal & ocean studies
About this Event

is a water scientist, legal scholar, policy expert, writer, and enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation. Dr. Leonard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, where her research focuses on Indigenous water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings. Dr. Leonard seeks to establish Indigenous traditions of water conservation as the foundation for international water policymaking. She represents the Shinnecock Indian Nation on the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which is charged with protecting America’s ocean ecosystems and coastlines. She also serves as a member of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board of the International Joint Commission. Her regional ocean policy work in collaboration with Tribes, state, federal and fishery management council entities received a Peter Benchley Ocean Award for Excellence in Solutions.

This event is free and open to the public and campus communities. The location for this event will be updated in early September.

The Just Ocean and Coastal Futures Conference brings together future-oriented scholars at all career stages who integrate reparative frameworks into coastal and ocean studies. The purpose of the conference is to share and produce knowledge while imagining, designing, and supporting strategic action. Over three days of individual presentations, invited keynotes, roundtable discussions, workshop sessions, and communal events, participants will acknowledge, identify, and challenge pernicious ocean and coastal inequities including past and present events and structural processes at local, regional, and global scales. This will be an intimate gathering of professional scholars and graduate students from around the US, working domestically and internationally, committed to catalyzing just futures in coastal and ocean studies via knowledge and practice sharing, networking, and solidarity building to reaffirm our commitments to changing the culture of ocean and coastal research and policy in a time of fear and retrenchment.

The Just Ocean and Coastal Futures Conference is coordinated by of the Ashley School of Global Development and Environment and sponsored by the and the at Cornell University.