Vivian Underhill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She produces applied scholarship at the intersection of anthropology, environmental health, and feminist and critical race science studies. She experiments with methodologies, pedagogies, and modes of public scholarship that are of direct to communities organizing for water and climate justice and might catalyze the tools of the academy toward anticolonial climate and water justice futures. Her work reconsiders some of the most central concepts in environmental and climate justice - including contamination, race, and evidence - in order to avoid reifying the same colonial logics that produced contemporary environmental and climate crises. Her current book project, entitled Drained: Water, Oil, and Environmental Justice in Colonial California, is a multi-modal study of environmental justice practice and relations, grounded in the San Joaquin Valley of California, in which the past is not only context but an actor itself. The book shows that San Joaquin Valley’s history and present are instructive for understanding climate change, its origins, and its impacts more broadly. These waterways’ destruction in service of white property and oil extraction is a microcosm of our current global environmental collapse: we are all frogs in a drying pond, though some, always, are more exposed than others. Ultimately, the book shows that the group-differentiated devaluing of human and more-than-human life and relations through drainage is not exceptional, but rather is fundamental to a colonial/capitalist structure.

Selected recent publications

2026     “Flows and frictions in translocating water stories: We never stand in the same river twice.” Vivian Underhill, Victoria Derr, and Juan Ramirez. Location Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 1-18.

2025     “Deregulatory disclosure regimes and masked absences in US fracking chemical data.” Vivian Underhill, Gary Allison, and Becky Mansfield. Science, Technology and Human Values. 0(0): 1-21.

2025     “What do we mean when we say carbon capture and storage? Critical STS and the open questions of a technology in emergence.” Vivian Underhill and Jessica Smith. Engaging Science, Technology and Society 11(3): 9-28. 

2024    “What work does ‘contamination’ do? An agential realist account of oil wastewater and radium in groundwater.” Vivian Underhill & Karen Barad. Social Studies of Science 55(3): 1-35. 

2023     “The Return of Pa’ashi: Colonial Unknowing and California’s Tulare Lake.” Vivian Underhill. Open Rivers 24: 2-13. 

2023     “The Coloniality of Modern Water: Global Groundwater Extraction in California, Palestine and Peru.” Vivian Underhill, Linnea Beckett, Muna Dajani, Maria Teresa de Oré, Sheeva Sabati. Water Alternatives 16(1): 13-38.

2023     “Outcomes of the Halliburton Loophole: Chemicals Regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act in US Fracking Disclosures, 2014-2021.” Vivian Underhill, Angelica Fiuza,* Gary Allison, Grace Poudrier,* Sarah Lerman-Sinkoff,* Lourdes Vera, Sara Wylie. Environmental Pollution 322: 120552. 

2022     “From Kern Island to the Streets of Bakersfield: Logics of Contamination, Embodied Empiricisms, and the Afterlives of Reclamation.” Vivian Underhill. Catalyst 8(2): 1-27. 

2022     “Against Settler Sustainability: California’s Groundwater as a Vertical Frontier.” Vivian Underhill, Sheeva Sabati, Linnea Beckett. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(4): 516-538.