Nancy Tuana wins 2022 Davion Award for Intersectionality in Environmental Ethics

The International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) and Ethics & the Environment journal are pleased to announce publicly the winner of the 2022 Victoria Davion Award for Intersectionality in Environmental Ethics: Dr. Nancy Tuana, DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

To help build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive field of environmental ethics, the International Society for Environmental Ethics and Ethics & the Environment journal seek to highlight intersectional scholarship in environmental philosophy. To this end, we established an award in recognition of Dr. Victoria Davion, a professor at University of Georgia who made cutting-edge contributions to interdisciplinary work in feminist and environmental ethics and was founding editor of the journal, Ethics & the Environment. At the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society, Dr. Chris Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at University of Georgia, delivered a keynote address and was the inaugural recipient of the award. Dr. Melanie Harris, who is currently Professor of Black Feminist Thought and Womanist Theology at Wake Forest University, where she serves as Director of the Food, Health and Ecological Well-Being Program, won the 2021 award.

The Davion award honors scholars engaged in intersectional work that describes, considers, or responds to overlapping forms of exclusion, discrimination, or injustice – such as the interplay of race, class, and gender in environmental injustice, or the relationship between colonialism and climate inequities. The award further recognizes work in research, teaching, and service that extends the scope of environmental ethics to incorporate perspectives and methods that have been historically marginalized or excluded from environmental philosophy as a discipline.

This year’s winner, Dr. Nancy Tuana, clearly exemplifies the qualities the Davion award seeks to recognize. She has decades of experience engaging key questions at the intersection of environmental and social justice, collaborating across disciplines, and stretching disciplinary boundaries to include perspectives previously excluded or marginalized. Dr. Tuana is a wide- ranging scholar whose areas of expertise include feminist philosophy, liberatory epistemologies, approaches to intersectionality, and epistemological and ethical issues in science. She has done especially important work on coupled epistemic and ethical issues in climate science and climate policy, highlighting critical issues of gender, racial, and socio- economic justice.

Dr. Tuana has worked to develop community-based climate adaptation strategies through a variety of grants including the National Science Foundation funded projects “Sustainable Climate Risk Management” (https://www.scrim.psu.edu/) and the “Megalopolitan Costal Transformation Hub” (https://coastalhub.org/) as well as the “Penn State Initiative for Resilient Communities” (https://www.psirc.psu.edu/). And she has collaboratively developed approaches to integrate Indigenous knowledge into forest management through the National Science Foundation-funded project, “Visualizing Forest Futures Under Climate Uncertainty: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge into Decision Support Tools for Collaborative Decision Making” (https://viff.psu.edu/). She was the founding director of the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute which, under her direction, has also taken the lead nationally and internationally in developing innovative interdisciplinary and policy relevant ethical research on topics such as climate change ethics. Through her books, articles, and collaborative engagements, Dr. Tuana has highlighted the value dimensions of science and the importance of multi-perspectival, transdisciplinary work to engage environmental issues. Her new book, Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference: An Ecointersectional Approach, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, focuses on the intersections between systemic racisms and climate injustice, making an important contribution to intersectional environmental philosophy.