On Environmental Psychology and the Study of Structural Racism

Trevor Lies, University of Kansas
Syed Muhammad Omar, University of Kansas
Glenn Adams, University of Kansas

Scholars are increasingly calling upon psychological disciplines to confront structural racism in their science and society more generally. Owing to a disciplinary tendency to neglect how our objects of study (e.g., ideology) manifest in the environment, recent critique has pushed psychologists to situate their work within frameworks that incorporate the historical and structural character of racism (e.g., Trawalter et al., 2020). One discipline often absent from these conversations is environmental psychology (EP). For most, mentions of EP likely recall topics of pro-environmental behavior, climate change, and sustainability, which indeed constitute EP’s dominant contemporary foci. However, the discipline’s defining notion lies in a more general idea—that psychological experience is best understood “as it depends on its factual environment” (Hellpach, 1924).

Regarding the psychology of structural racism, this idea is important for two reasons. First, it alerts us that psychological experience is not confined to the brain but exists in a mutually reinforcing relationship with structures of our everyday environments: subjectivity is a product of culturally-produced environments, and everyday environments are outgrowths of culturally-produced subjectivities. This point leads to the second, that EP’s defining notion aligns with a central insight of critical race psychology: racism is a constitutive feature of the modern order and consciousness about this reality is necessary to accurately apprehend contemporary social life (Salter et al., 2024).

Despite this resonance, there appears to be little explicit conversation about racism or its study in mainstream EP. In a recent project (under review), we considered the extent and character of research on racism in two mainstream journals of EP: the Journal of Environmental Psychology and Environment & Behavior. We find that of the roughly 4,700 articles published over the history of the two journals, the word “racism” appeared in the body of the text of only 45 articles, and most of them either do not focus on racism in its own right or they explicitly distinguish between racism and topics the authors understand to be environmental in character. Nineteen of the 45 reviewed articles approach racism as a substantive focus of research. Of these, 15 locate racism in the everyday environment, for instance, by detailing how housing discrimination determines the conditions in which people live (e.g., Loo & Ong, 1984). One implication that follows from our critical review is that scholars of mainstream EP may not think racism “counts as an environmental issue” (Song et al., 2020, p. 2).

The initial goal of our review was to evaluate EP’s potential as a site for the study of structural racism. EP provides a framework and some scholarship toward this end, but the field generally evades attention to the racialized character of everyday environments. The defining notion of EP—that is, its attention to the everyday environment—is a necessary but insufficient starting point to think through the psychology of structural racism. Moving forward, we argue the discipline should take the world-constituting reality of racism as a starting point through which to think about the (re)production of subjectivities and everyday environments.