Frances B. Roberts-Gregory

Frances Roberts-Gregory is a feminist political ecologist and environmental anthropologist, researching the role of U.S. Afrodiasporic communities and women of color in UNFCCC climate negotiations and feminist climate policy.

Frances earned a BA in Environmental Studies, Sociology, & Anthropology from Spelman College and earned a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy & Management from the University of California, Berkeley. She later completed a Future Faculty Fellowship in the School of Law at Northeastern University. Her dissertation research investigates how Gulf Coast Black and Indigenous women within Louisiana's river and bayou parishes navigate contradictory relationships with energy & petrochemical industries and resist state corporate crime and environmental violence. By exploring multi-scalar strategies of everyday resistance, her feminist activist research engages questions of environmental governance through just transitions while advocating for abolitionist energy and climate justice. She also innovates feminist mixed methods through the development of ecowomanist (auto)ethnography (EWAE) as methodological intervention.

Frances taught gender, environmental communications, and climate justice at Tulane University, Bard Early College New Orleans, and the University for Peace in Costa Rica. She formerly consulted for the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice as a co-manager of the Gulf Equity Youth Water Corps Project and the C40 and City of New Orleans Women4Climate Mentorship Program. She later served as a Climate Justice Program Officer for the Foundation for Louisiana and advanced leadership development as a Program Director at the Initiative for Energy Justice. She published chapters in the Routledge Handbook on the Green New Deal and Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism and articles within Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Anthropology News, Edge Effects, and Geoforum. Frances currently serves as an advisory board co-chair for the HIVE Fund for Climate & Gender Justice and advances the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal at UNFCCC COPs through the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC).

As an Environmental Fellow, Frances will work with Professor Tiya Miles to develop a book manuscript and “Ecowomanist Digital Archive” based on her dissertation. Her postdoctoral research will further engage digital humanities and environmental communication to map women of color’s participation in the #Justice40 Initiative. Frances will finally historicize the privilege/oppression nexus through Black women’s efforts to build people power and transnational coalitions at UNFCCC climate negotiations.