About

Sara Smiley Smith is a lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment. She holds a BA in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College, obtained in 2004, and earned her MESc, MPH, and PhD from Yale University’s School of the Environment and School of Public Health, respectively, in 2007 and 2016. Her educational background reflects a strong foundation in environmental studies, public health, and environmental science. The page does not provide specific details about her research focus, key contributions, or professional background beyond her academic credentials and current position.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Gender studies
• Law
• Religious studies
• Political economy
• Art
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Relations outside of injury: Black ecologies, Indigenous geographies, and repair

  UNC Libraries · 2026-01-02

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• On stolen land, by stolen people: Engaging with legacies of land dispossession and enslavement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2025-09-08 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  As faculty, staff, and students at a flagship public university in the US South—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—we inhabit land, infrastructure, and institutions that are foundationally entangled in Native dispossession, enslavement, and other complex processes of disenfranchisement. This article traces the experimental work of the Landback Abolition Project in asking how, through a land-as-pedagogy approach, we might enact more ethical relations to land and life, even within an educational framework shaped by racial capitalism. At the heart of our work is the question: how do faculty, students, staff, and community of a 234-year-old colonial institution create the conditions for a structural shift in our relations toward land and education? We build on recent scholarship on landgrab universities and reparations and share our approach to this work at our university, and how place-based research requires and educates us on the intersections of Black and Indigenous geographies.

  PublisherDOI

• Intersectional feminism beyond U.S. flag hijab and pussy hats in Trump’s America

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-17

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Since Trump came to power, he has undertaken a series of executive actions meant to threaten and terrorize a multitude of ‘others’: immigrants, Muslims, women, African Americans, Native Americans, transgender people. The defensively aggressive strategies of deportation, walls, and internal violence aim to define who belongs within the U.S. national territory and protect a threatened white masculinity which is portrayed as both victim and victor. Women and allies have been at the forefront of voicing opposition to Trumpism by organizing one of the largest marches in U.S. history on the day after inauguration and continue to resist through strikes, demonstrations, and other actions. They are raising their voices against the walls, hatred, and deportations embedded in the global turn to the right and attempting to embrace an intersectional feminism that recognizes racial, ethnic, religious, class, and other differences. Yet, in the protest signs and the embodied experience of the 21 January march itself, there were also spiraling redefinitions of what it means to be woman, what it means to be ‘American,’ and whether that is an aspirational goal or the terms of nationalist exclusion, settler colonialism, and imperial feminism. Intersectional feminism does not come easily and its challenges are manifest in some of the iconic symbols of the women’s movement – from the Muslim Woman in the U.S. flag hijab to pink pussy hats. We find spaces of protest fraught but crucial sites of for forging forms of solidarity that are radical in their feminist formulations.

  PublisherDOI

• Reading Andrew Curley's Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press (2023). 217 pp ISBN 9780816539604

  Political Geography · 2025-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Making America great again”?: The fascist body politics of Donald Trump

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-18

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Can a city be anticolonial? Stephen Legg’s <i>Spaces of Anticolonialism</i>

  Scottish Geographical Journal · 2025-12-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call &ldquo;domestic geopolitics.&rdquo; Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of Black geographies as a domestic form of colonialism, with an expanded understanding of domesticity as political work. We develop the domestic geopolitics framework based on the dual meaning of domestic: the inward facing geopolitics of racialization and the resistance embodied in domestic labors of maintaining life, home, and community. Drawing on Black feminist scholars, we describe three categories of social reproductive labor in conditions of racialized toxicity: the labor of keeping wake, the labor of tactical expertise, and the labor of revolutionary mothering. We argue that Black survival struggles exemplify a domestic geopolitics of everyday warfare against racial capitalism&rsquo;s onslaught.

  PublisherDOI

• Political geographies of discomfort feminism: introduction to the themed intervention

  UNC Libraries · 2025-03-22

  articleOpen access

  What does discomfort do? What kinds of spaces, boundaries, and power relations are generated by comfort, and for whom? In this introduction to the themed section, we trace comfort/discomfort across borders and through spaces to see when and how these emotions and affective relations generate life and growth, and when they instead circumscribe possibilities. The introduction and the contributions to this issue question &lsquo;comfort feminism&rsquo; to consider the role of comfort/discomfort across a range of settings: from protests and activist spaces, to royal weddings, academic institutions, academic disciplines, and the public portrayals of political figures. Across these moments and narratives, flashes of discomfort serve as starting points for analysis. What kind of feminism do we find if we begin from discomfort? What kind of fairytales do we tell ourselves in order to maintain the status quo? How is comfort produced and distributed? Is there be political potential in disrupting public comfort? Through this special issue, we encourage geographers to attend to how comfort makes and unmakes social worlds, senses of belonging, and disciplinary boundaries. We push geographers to trace discomfort as an analytic and as a method for feminist political geography.

  PublisherDOI

• Decolonisation is a Political Project: Overcoming Impasses between Indigenous Sovereignty and Abolition

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-03

  articleOpen access

  In this article we seek to intervene in conversations that frame Black abolition and decolonisation as antagonistic political projects. We respond to Garba and Sorentino&rsquo;s (2020) &ldquo;Slavery is a metaphor&rdquo;, which critiques Tuck and Yang (2012; &ldquo;Decolonization is not a metaphor&rdquo;) and decolonisation. Our concern is that scholarship in this vein denies Indigenous sovereignty and futurity while unnecessarily characterising decolonisation as antiblack. We contend that ontological, epistemological, and disciplinary traps lead to this problem: reductions, conflations, and taking settler‐enslavers&rsquo; word as truth. We suggest that critiques of settler colonial studies shouldn&rsquo;t be confused with the aims of Indigenous decolonisation, where the former is largely driven by white scholarship and the latter is an Indigenous‐led project rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. We focus on questions of land and sovereignty, gesturing toward framings that are inclusive of Black, Native, and immigrant communities.

  PublisherDOI

• Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, originally a response to the July 2013 acquittal of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin&rsquo;s vigilante killer in Florida gained the silent &lsquo;&lsquo;hands up, don&rsquo;t shoot&rsquo;&rsquo; gesture in reference to the August 2014 fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a police officer subsequently acquitted by a grand jury. That winter, a New York City policeman was acquitted by a grand jury despite videotaped evidence of the July 2014 choking of Eric Garner, and t-shirts worn at protests and at sporting events called us to remember Garner&rsquo;s last words: &lsquo;&lsquo;I can&rsquo;t breathe.&rsquo;&rsquo; In each case, the loss of a young black man&rsquo;s life was followed by a second symbolic death, in the highlighting of the victim&rsquo;s supposed flaws and mistakes and the subsequent failure to hold anyone accountable for the death. A growing litany of these police killings was then given intersectional nuance by #SayHerName&rsquo;s recounting of Black female, queer and trans victims who had not only been subject to violence but then omitted from the public recounting. The names of Sandra Bland, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, Philando Castille, and too many others signal particular lives valued and mourned, but also indicate a repetition and wearing down of life. We wrote the proposal with ferocious anger and with the Movement for Black Lives in mind as an expression of righteous fury at state violence that cuts directly to the heart of race-biopolitics.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Stefan N. Constantinescu

  Ludwig Cancer Research

  90 shared

• Thomas P. Sakmar

  Rockefeller University

  79 shared

• Markus Eilers

  Stony Brook University

  78 shared

• Saburo Aimoto

  Osaka University

  74 shared

• M. Groesbeek

  Yale University

  56 shared

• Philip J. Reeves

  University of Essex

  54 shared

• Martine Ziliox

  Stony Brook University

  53 shared

• May Han

  Stanford Medicine

  52 shared