Christian Espinosa Schatz

Christian Espinosa Schatz

Ph.D. Candidate in the combined doctoral degree program between the School of the Environment and Department of Anthropology at Yale University  

I am a second year doctoral student in Yale’s combined degree in Anthropology and Environmental Studies. My passion for environmental justice grew out of the disorienting experience of being a first-generation college student at Harvard. In grappling with academics, inequality, and my own working-class, evangelical background, I found personal and intellectual traction in the environmental social sciences. Since then I have pursued scholarship on climate change as an issue of justice, knowledge, and power. My current project works with Mayan agrarian communities in Guatemala’s western highlands to understand how a historically marginalized people group navigates climate change through local environmental knowledge, scientific expertise, and transnational mobility.