Dr. Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in feminist intersectional science studies, environmental humanities, Black geographies, feminist theory and queer of color critique. She is currently the director of Barnard’s Interdisciplinary Race and Ethnic Studies Minor (ICORE/MORE), an editorial board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and Scholar and Feminist Online.

 

She has written a number of articles on the relationship between waste and Black life in the U.S., including, “The Ghetto is a Gold Mine” for the Journal of Labor and Working-Class History and “Ecologies Elsewhere” for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. Her work also appears in a number of edited volumes such as, Waste as Critique (Oxford University Press), Black Environmentalisms (forthcoming with Duke University Press) and The Politics of Disposability (Duke University Press). One of her essays, “The Edge of the Usual,” also appears in a compilation of essays for the 2023 Venice Biennial on Everlasting Plastics. 

 

In today’s conversation, we discuss her new book, The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life (Duke University Press 2025), which received Duke University Press’s Scholar of Color First Book Award, considers ecological politics from the position of Black dispossession. In so doing, The Elsewhere Is Black points us to the durability of racism and its many material forms: toxicity’s movement through soil and bodies, the placement of landfills, waste infrastructure, and the technocratic planning and management of Black life and death.