Ashia Ajani ’19, MEM ’21 is a Doctoral Student at UC Santa Cruz

Ashia Ajani ’19, MEM ’21 is an environmental writer, researcher and educator. Ashia’s work explores Black ecological experiences and the connections among environmental justice, racialized geographies, collective memory, and relationships to land and the built environment. Learn more about Ashia’s work.

At Yale, Ashia earned a B.A. in Environmental Studies and a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of the Environment, specializing in People, Equity, and the Environment. Ashia’s senior essay, The Formation of Black and Indigenous Relationships and Identities Through Land Struggles in Oklahoma and Kansas from 1854–1930, was advised by Amity Doolittle. Ashia also worked as a climate justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network and as a research assistant in Dr. Dorceta Taylor’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Sustainability Initiative lab. Read Ashia’s Yale JEDSI profile. Ashia is currently enrolled in a sociology doctoral program at UC Santa Cruz, where they will be advised by Dr. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Dr. Lindsey Dillon.

Ashia is the author of the poetry collection Heirloom and the forthcoming nonfiction work Tending the Vines:Black Abundance in Eight Plants. Ashia’s words have appeared in publications including Orion Magazine, Sierra Magazine, Atmos, World Literature Today, and Callaloo Literary Journal. Ashia’s writing challenges historical exclusion of diasporic Black communities from narratives about nature while illuminating capricious relationships among colonialism, racial injustice, climate change, and access to land. As Ashia explained in an interview with the Yale Herald, the work seeks to recenter Blackness in natural landscapes and examine the histories of violence embedded in our geographies—as well as what it might take to heal them.