On this page, you will find a list of resources you might find helpful for your own reading or to share with your colleagues and students.

Recommended reading for equity through UW Libraries

The Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, in collaboration with librarian Emily Keller and Maureen Nolan, have developed a new online Environmental Justice research guide, available through the UW Libraries website. This collection of resources provides links to journals, sites, community tools, books, and reports that cover a wide range of themes related to environmental and social justice with the goals of raising awareness and push a more equitable and diversified environmental movement.

In addition, Recommended Reads for Equity engages the UW community in critical conversations, reading, critical thinking and community building; all of which are essential to lifelong learning and engaged citizenship.

Guided by the UW community, we will collect recommendations for books about equity, diversity, and inclusion and create opportunities to share recommendations and hold conversations and discussions as a whole campus community.
The community’s recommendations will be used to build a new book collection in Odegaard Library, ultimately creating a lasting legacy of UW’s commitment to and interest in equity.

Other recommended reading

The Chronicle of Higher Education has great articles on recent current events, campus actions, policies and reactions to current events in diversity and inclusion at US universities.

There is also a plethora of books and articles on social and environmental justice, here is a small selection:

  • Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (2016). Blindspot: Hidden biases of good people. Bantam.
  • Bonilla-Silva, E. (1997). Rethinking racism: Toward a structural interpretation. American Sociological Review, 62(3), 465-480.
  • Bullard, R. (2005). The quest for environmental justice: Human rights and the politics of pollution (First ed.). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
  • Carmin, J., & Agyeman, J. (2011). Environmental inequalities beyond borders: Local perspectives on global injustices (Urban and industrial environments). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Crutcher, B. (2007). Mentoring Across Cultures. The Education Digest, 73(4), 21-25.
  • Delgado, R. (Ed.). (1997). Critical white studies: Looking behind the mirror. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  • Deloria, V. & Wildcat, D. (2001). Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden. Fulcrum.
  • DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
  • Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education. University of Michigan Press.
  • Evans-Campbell, T. (2008). Historical trauma in American Indian/Native Alaska communities: A multilevel framework for exploring impacts on individuals, families, and communities. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 23, 316-338
  • Finney, C. (2014). Black faces, white spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the great outdoors. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
  • Freire, P., & Ramos, M. (2009). Chapter 2 from “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 2(2), 163-174.
  • Frye, J.R. &. Morton, C.S. (2016). Strategic Planning for Diversity in Higher Education: Insights from a Multi-Institution Research Project. University of Michigan National Center for Institutional Diversity.1-5.
  • Gewin, V. (2018). What does it take to make an institution more diverse? Nature, 558(7708), 149-151.
  • Green, L. (2008). ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity. Archaeologies, 4(1), 144-163.
  • Harper, S., & National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. (2008). Creating inclusive campus environments: For cross-cultural learning and student engagement. Washington, D.C.]: NASPA.
  • Harrison, C. & Tanner, K.D. (2018). Language matters: Considering microaggressions in science. CBE Life Sciences Education, 17, 1-8.
  • Johnson, A. (2006). Privilege, power, and difference (Second ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
  • Johnson, P., Widnall, S. E., Benya, Frazier F., & National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine. Policy Global Affairs. (2018). Sexual harassment of women: Climate, culture, and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine (Consensus study report). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
  • Kendall, F. (2013). Understanding white privilege: Creating pathways to authentic relationships across race (Second ed., Teaching/learning social justice). New York: Routledge.
  • Kendi, I. X. (2017). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Random House.
  • LaDuke, W., & Cruz, Sean Aaron. (2016). The Winona LaDuke chronicles: Stories from the front lines in the battle for environmental justice. Ponsford, MN: Halifax: Spotted Horse Press; Fernwood Publishing.
  • Laslett, B. (1996). Gender and scientific authority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Lee, E. M. (2016). Class and campus life: Managing and experiencing inequality at an elite college. Cornell University Press.
  • Mattias de Vries, K. (2012). Intersectional identities and conceptions of the self: The experience of transgender people. Symbolic Interaction, 35(1), 49-67.
  • Mendoza-Denton, R., Patt, C., & Richards, M. (2018). Go beyond bias training. Nature, 557 (7705), 299-301.
  • Oluo, I. (2019). So you want to talk about race. Seal Press.
  • Ong, M., Wright, C., Espinosa, L., & Orfield, G. (2011). Inside the Double-Bind: A Synthesis of Empirical Research on Undergraduate and Graduate Women of Color in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Harvard Educational Review, 81(1), 172-208.
  • Osanloo, A.F., Boske, C., Newcomb, W.S. (2016). Deconstructing macroaggressions, microaggressions, and structural racism in education: Developing a conceptual model for the intersection of social justice practice and intercultural education. International Journal of Organizational Theory and Development, 4, 1-18.
  • Peterson, Rubie-Davies, Osborne, & Sibley. (2016). Teachers’ explicit expectations and implicit prejudiced attitudes to educational achievement: Relations with student achievement and the ethnic achievement gap. Learning and Instruction, 42, 123-140.
  • Pulido, L. (2017). Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 524-533.
  • Schlosberg, D., & Collins, L. (2014). From environmental to climate justice: Climate change and the discourse of environmental justice. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 5(3), 359-374.
  • Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: And other clues to how stereotypes affect us (1st ed., Issues of our time (W.W. Norton & Company)). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
  • Stewart, A. J., & Valian, V. (2018). An inclusive academy: Achieving diversity and excellence. Mit Press.
  • Sue, D. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual orientation. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
  • Sue, D. (2015). Race talk and the conspiracy of silence: Understanding and facilitating difficult dialogues on race. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.
  • Tatum, B. (2017). Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?: And other conversations about race (Third trade paperback edition; Twentieth anniversary ed.). New York: Basic Books.
  • Taylor, D. E. (2002). Race, class, gender, and American environmentalism. USDA Forest Service – General Technical Report PNW, (534), 1-51.
  • Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1(1).
  • Wildcat, R. (2009). Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. Golden. Fulcrum.
  • Wilder, C. (2013). Ebony & Ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s Universities (First U.S. ed.). New York: Bloomsbury Press.
  • Wright, W. J. (2018). As Above, So Below: Anti-Black Violence as Environmental Racism. Antipode.

Other campus resources

  • Race & Equity Initiative
    A tri-campus initiative to directly confront bias and racism at the individual, institutional and systemic levels.
  • Resisting Racism Library Guide
    From art and fiction to scholarly journals and web videos, there are many ways folks from all communities are resisting racism.
  • UW Diversity & Inclusion Seed Grants
    Small grants support projects for institutional transformation across the University of Washington’s tri-campus community that align with the goals of the 2017-2021 UW Diversity Blueprint.