Matthew Sparke

While at CASBS, Matt Sparke will study the social conditioning of inequalities in ‘resilience’.  This research will build on a project called Campo-Sano that he has been leading for the last two years. The Campo-Sano team brought together multi-disciplinary expertise and diverse community partner organizations to examine how the burdens of climate change add compounding environmental health or ‘eco-syndemic’ risks to farmworker communities in California. To tackle these risks, the project created the Campo-Sano map app to advance knowledge of the compounding risks as well as awareness of the resources and rights that can be drawn on by farmworkers in response.  Assessing both the achievements and limitations of this Campo-Sano collaboration now calls for careful engagement with related research in the social sciences on how resilience is variously advanced and diminished in disenfranchised communities. The broad avenues of enquiry that intersect at CASBS – including into law, justice, governance, risk, borders and political-economy – will provide important intersectional insights into how resilience is conditioned this way by social context. 

As a distinguished professor of politics, and as a co-director of Global and Community Health at University of California, Santa Cruz,  Sparke looks forward to learning from the associated interdisciplinary conversations.