Vivian R. Underhill

Vivian Underhill’s scholarship bridges groundwater hydrology, anthropology, and feminist and critical race science studies toward community-engaged research on oil, groundwater, and the environmental justice issues surrounding their extraction. She holds a B.A. in Hydrology from the University of Colorado and will hold a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz in January 2022. Through archival research, ethnographic work, and community collaborations, her dissertation research investigated scientific knowledge and environmental justice activism around groundwater contamination and oil drilling in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Her broader research agenda prioritizes community-based collaborative relationships and multidisciplinary methodologies spanning the geologic and social sciences, working to understand the material-discursive production of contamination within settler colonial and racial capitalist formations.