Check out Associate Professor in Residence Phoebe Godfrey's two new books!

Written by the co-founder and former board president of a non-profit shared-use commercial kitchen, Understanding Just Sustainabilities from Within presents an intersectional analysis of CLiCK (Commercially Licensed Co-operative Kitchen), in order to explore what just sustainabilities can look and feel like from within and without.

Through a unique combination of autoethnography, participant observation, surveys, and secondary research, this book offers insights into CLiCK’s micro and macro successes, failures, and unknowns in relation to its attempt to put the concept of just sustainabilities into daily practice, and praxis. Developing its practical analyses from a theoretical basis, this book does not focus on definitive answers, recognizing instead that the closest we can get to understanding just sustainabilities in praxis is through long-term collective struggle and ultimately love.

Researchers and educators who are interested in linking theory with practice, especially in relation to just sustainabilities and intersectionality, will appreciate the theoretical grounding, making it desirable for multiple social science classes. Additionally, those involved with the social justice, food justice, and just sustainabilities movements will benefit from the book’s insights into best practices to address issues of social inequalities on the micro level, while also offering the benefits of a macro intersectional analysis.

At a time when environmental and social stakes are at their highest – with rising crises and contradictions at the nexus of a building sense of environmental and social collapse – there are no easy solutions. Global Im-Possibilities explores just what can be done around the world to ameliorate this dynamic.

Using a range of essays and a multitude of case studies, this book explores what new lessons can be learned from examining the challenges and impediments to achieving just sustainabilities on the levels of policy, planning, and practice, and considers how these challenges and impediments can be addressed by individuals and/or governments.

Taking a nuanced approach to provide an intersectional analysis of a particular issue relating to the ideals for achieving sustainability, this book asserts that that it is only in recognizing such complexity that we can hope to achieve just sustainabilities.

Read Associate Professor in Residence Phoebe Godfrey's recent article in Neighbors, "Social Environmental Justice Begins with 'Radical Self-Love.'" Citing her current Sustainable Societies course and the work of Sonya Renee Taylor, Dr. Godfrey forwards that Western culture breeds disembodiment, and "only a disembodied culture would actively, knowingly, and willingly destroy its external body, the Earth."

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The article in UConn Today called "Campus Welcomes a New Garden to Foster Connection in Memory of the Late ‘Swing Tree" discusses a new garden overlooking Swan Lake serves both to memorialize the beloved "swing tree" and to foster conversations among the UConn community.

Phoebe Godfrey, Associate Professor in Residence of Sociology, says her fall 2019 Society and Climate Change course decided to build some benches as part of the service learning component of the class. She says, " In the past, I have had the students pick small projects and a lot of the projects have focused on the UConn community,” says Godfrey. “The way I teach is to build community, because I do not think it is very effective to teach about climate change or structural racism or patriarchy in a hierarchical way. In class, it came up that there weren’t enough dialogues about climate change and there weren’t enough spaces to talk about it in intelligent and thoughtful ways.”

These benches face each other in order to create conversation about any topic people want to discuss there. This place is Phoebe's idea of her foundation on the topic of social construction among people.