5th International YEAH Virtual Conference, April 2022

Lauren Eastwood is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, College at Plattsburgh.  She is currently on leave from her position at SUNY and living in Duisburg, Germany where she is Senior Researcher at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21).  There, she also heads up the “Global Governance of Climate Change and Sustainability” policy field.   Her primary research areas include civil society participation in policy making through the United Nations, the shifting politics of fracking and other forms of energy extraction, and the increasing criminalization of anti-fossil fuel activism. The research she does through the United Nations is ethnographic and participatory, in the sense that she attends meetings associated with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (among others) in order to investigate how it is that policy is actually negotiated within the context of UN-based deliberations. In these areas, she pays particular attention to the ways in which non-governmental and indigenous peoples attempt to influence policy processes. In her other research, she investigates the changing legal terrain of activism as people contest fossil-fuel based infrastructure.

Stacey Sublett Halliday is a Principal with the environmental law firm of Beveridge & Diamond, P.C., where she advises corporate clients on a range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Through her work at Beveridge & Diamond, Stacey provides an array of corporate social responsibility and sustainability services to help clients meet requirements and demand for ethical, sustainable practices clients—including circular economy, supply chain, and environmental justice (EJ) initiatives. Stacey previously held a political appointment as Special Counsel in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of General Counsel (OGC), where she worked directly with the General Counsel to coordinate OGC’s internal activities, in addition to serving as OGC’s primary liaison for external federal, state and private sector stakeholder engagement. Stacey also served as a senior member of the EPA oversight response team, where she provided legal and strategic guidance on congressional investigation and hearing preparation (including for the EPA Administrator and Deputy Administrator), White House and interagency coordination, and crisis management and strategic communications.She currently holds leadership roles with the American Bar Association (Chair, SEER Membership Diversity Enhancement Program; Vice Chair of Environmental Justice, Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Ecosystems Committee), and the Environmental Law Institute (Board Member; Steering Committee Chair, Emerging Leaders Initiative).

Dr Valerie Small is the National Program Director at the conservation non-profit Trees, Water & People. Dr Small focuses upon partnership building with Indigenous based non-profits and Tribal governments to increase capacity, facilitate funding for Tribal designed, led and managed natural resource projects that included rangelands, riparian and forest ecosystems within reservation boundaries and ancestral lands adjacent to Tribal lands. The primary focus on partnership building was to Indigenize our approach in building trust, within a community-based development framework. Dr Small developed new programs to include forest regeneration that increased the diversity mix of tree species to include culturally significant species such as plains cottonwoods (Populus delotides) chokecherry, buffalo berry and wild plum to empower tribal food sovereignty programs.