Curriculum Vitae (updated October 2022)

Kirk Jalbert is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability in the University at Buffalo. He directs the Civic Science for Environmental Futures Collaborative, a collective space exploring participatory action research projects driven by communities working to create more equitable environment futures. 

Kirk’s research explores public engagements with environmental science and governance that emerge from energy justice movements and how these are shaped by data mobilizations, information technologies, and community-driven scientific research efforts. His work additionally seeks to understand social, political, and technical relationships that make for effective partnerships spanning academic, nonprofit, and community-based research practice. Kirk has also worked in the nonprofit sector, facilitating data transparency, mapping, and digital storytelling projects as Manager of Community-Based Research and Engagement for the FracTracker Alliance. He served on the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Environmental Justice Advisory Board from 2016 to 2018. Kirk received his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his M.F.A. in Media Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Tufts, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements, and Alternative Futures

Edited by Kirk Jalbert, Anna Willow, David Casagrande, and Stephanie Paladino
Foreword by June Nash, afterword by Jeanne Simonelli

Available from Amazon.com and Routledge.

This timely volume examines resistance to natural resource extraction from a critical ethnographic perspective. Using a range of case studies from North, Central and South America, Australia, and Central Asia, the contributors explore how and why resistance movements seek to change extraction policies, evaluating their similarities, differences, successes and failures. A range of ongoing debates concerning environmental justice, risk and disaster, sacrifice zones, and the economic cycles of boom and bust are engaged with, and the roles of governments, free markets and civil society groups re-examined. Incorporating contributions from authors in the fields of anthropology, public policy, environmental health, and community-based advocacy, ExtrACTION offers a robustly argued case for change. It will make engaging reading for academics and students in the fields of critical anthropology, public policy, and politics, as well as activists and other interested citizens.