During the Fall 2026 semester, I am launching the Place Based Justice (PB&J) Lab at the University of Cincinnati in the School of Environment and Sustainability as the organizer and facilitator with undergraduate/graduate student scholars and community partners. The PB&J Lab works to do research differently: we are values-drive, environmental justice forward, aligned by a feminist and abolitionist praxis, community-centered, action-based, and methods and education focused.
We currently have six projects that are co-envisioned with community groups and student scholars and you can read about these projects as well as our labs evolving and co-produced set of values, methods we use, and interdisciplinary engagements below.
Further, the PB&J Lab is inspired by a wide stretch of labs and thought collectives including CLEAR, CRASC Co-Lab, Participatory Cultures Lab, RAGE Lab, The Black Ecologies Lab, The Visiting Lab, Black Feminist Eco Lab, Indigenous Land and Data Stewards Lab, The Toxic Prisons Mapping Project, ziibiing lab, Carceral Ecologies, The Environmental Data Justice Lab, and many more (feel free to email me for a full list)!
If you are wanting to collaborate or share aligned work, please email koenignh [at] ucmail.uc.edu (academic) or kentuckynick [at] proton.me (personal).
Current Projects
Climate Justice Memorial Quilt
Inspired by the AIDs memorial quilt, we are sewing together a memorial quilt for the ongoing climate crisis as well as hosting workshops that sparks individual and collective preparedness to climate induced extreme weather events to build community resilience.
Appalachian Abolition Ecologies Resource Guide
A team of two students are creating a resource guide coalescing articles, books, podcasts, videos, news stories, and more that situate the rise of prison economies within Appalachia at the nexus of environmental and climate justice.
Cincinnati Air Pollution & Creative Data Visualization
Partnering with local advocates and community groups, we are working to create creative data visualizations that enliven the threats and concerns of highway infrastructures and air pollution within the greater Cincinnati region at the intersection of racial justice, environmental pollution, and mobility activism.
Environmental Education Zine Archive
A team of four students are co-creating an archive of environmental zines created at UC during the Spring 2025 semester that situates zines as pedagogical tool to counter artificial intelligence in the classroom.
Community Tree Ring Justice & Heavy Metal Contamination
In coordination with a community in the greater Cincinnati, we are utilizing tree rings and soil test to trace potential heavy metal contamination over time (tree rings) and in the present (soils) in coordination with an undergraduate capstone class at UC.
Queer Cartographies & Queering the Map
More info coming soon!
Values
Our research training has dappled in a varied collection of research frames, disciplines, and methods, but no matter what, the values I bring to research are:
- foregrounding community voices, desires, and knowledge
- profound fascination and love of plant life
- commitment to reciprocity with land and tribal voices
- education-forward in research process
- being playful and silly outside (most important)!
Methods
The methods we leverage depends on the place, people, and plants but has included
- field notes
- collective art and murals
- music composition
- archives
- semi-structured interviews
- walking interviews
- focus groups
- object monotype printmaking
- zines
- creative data visualization
- oral histories
- letterpress
- drawing
- tree ring methods
- ecology transects and plots
- herbarium collections
- floristic inventories
- phylogenetics
- multispecies ethnography
- community mapping
- data sonification
- speculative fiction
Disciplines
While we try to co-create research that disrupts disciplinary boundaries, the disciplines I often think and learn with are:
- political ecology & critical physical geography
- climate & environmental justice movements
- tree ring sciences & environmental sciences
- abolition & anti-colonial studies
- queer trans feminist geographies
- environmental humanities
- botany & biogeography
- narratology
- creative, prison pedagogies & teaching
- black & indigenous geographies
- gendered & petrochemical fascisms
See publications tab for list of peer-reviewed and public scholarship and below for a thematic breakdown of my work.
