Heidi Hausermann joined the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) as an associate professor specializing in Environmental Justice in fall 2024. She says that what drew her to SEAS was the focus on interdisciplinarity.

“I love the fact that you have all of these disciplines, people, and areas of study housed within SEAS because it makes things so inherently interdisciplinary. We have engineers, hydrologists, environmental justice and Indigenous scholars in the same hallway, and that’s a really unique thing that you don’t find in a lot of places,” says Hausermann.

This semester, Hausermann is teaching two courses: “Environmental Racism, Health and Pathways for Justice,” and “Approaches and Methodologies in Feminist and Environmental Justice Research.” Both are classes Hausermann says she has always wanted to teach because she has thought a lot about how feminist perspectives on science can help us do research that is more robust, ethical and important to communities, so she was excited to come to a program where students will be eager to take them.

In all of her courses, Hausermann wants her students to “learn how to talk about hard things, in ways that are grounded in readings, personal experiences and different epistemologies.”

When Hausermann isn’t teaching, she is conducting or supporting research. While pursuing her PhD at the University of Arizona, her research focused on coffee farming, land-use change and livelihood impacts in Mexico. She says her findings showed that people dealt with the global “coffee crisis” in complicated and creative ways.

“Coffee for a long time was kind of like oil, it was one of the most regulated commodities globally. In the 1990s, all of those price controls, tariffs, quotas, were dismantled along with organizations regulating coffee," says Hausermann. "And that restructuring had a hugely adverse impact on coffee farmers, who mostly are people, including Indigenous people, farming on small parcels of land."

Her research revealed correlations between coffee landscape maintenance and off-farm labor. Most people near urban areas employed creative livelihood strategies to keep farming coffee despite low prices.

After focusing her research on coffee farming for ten years, Hausermann was a postdoctoral researcher at Pennsylvania State University, where she pivoted her research to unregulated gold mining and the health impacts on local communities in Ghana. She’s led research projects in Ghana since 2010, investigating issues from mercury contamination and malaria in mining communities to mining’s impacts on farming systems.

Hausermann has since been dedicated to working with students on research. At Colorado State University (CSU), where she worked before coming to SEAS, Hausermann taught courses on the geography of global health, development and health and environment interactions. At Rutgers University, where she worked prior to CSU, she taught courses on agrarian landscapes, health, society and theory.

At SEAS, she is advising two master’s students on their research—one student is investigating how policies shape edible insect management in Veracruz, Mexico, and the other student is studying human-wildlife dynamics and the bushmeat trade near extractive areas in Ghana.

Having worked with a broad range of scholars and student researchers, Hausermann has cultivated a community she calls the Human Environment Collective. The collective, which meets in-person and online regularly, is focused on examining human-environment interactions—ways in which people adapt to or alter their natural surroundings—by promoting research that integrates theories and methods from feminist geography, political ecology, land-change science and public health.

Hausermann says there isn’t a better place to study environmental justice than at U-M, and no better time than now, particularly given sudden political shifts.

“Environmental justice is really important, and a lot of universities are adding it to their curriculum, which is so important. It’s been done really well at Michigan for a really long time. The EJ faculty here across campus is really robust and diverse, and it is a critical time to be studying environmental justice issues,” says Hausermann.