Frances Roberts-Gregory, PhD
Dr. Frances Roberts-Gregory is a gender and climate justice policy strategist, ecowomanist storyteller, and a performance artist. She leads environmental education, climate advocacy, and youth engagement initiatives with Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), LGBTQ, feminist, and abolitionist organizations committed to grassroots solutions and intersectional environmental justice.
As an environmental scientist, climate anthropologist, and community geographer, Dr. Roberts-Gregory examines the political priorities of Afrodiasporic, BIPOC, and women’s communities in UN climate negotiations and grassroots resistance to environmental violence. Her postdoctoral research supports capacity-building for ecofeminist and pan-African transnational coalitions through initiatives such as the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal, the UNFCCC Women and Gender Constituency, and the Global Afro-Descendants Climate Justice Collaborative.
Dr. Roberts-Gregory served as a climate justice program officer at the Foundation for Louisiana and as a program director of leadership development at the Northeastern University Initiative for Energy Justice.
She formerly served on the board of the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice and currently serves on the boards of One Square World and the HBCU Green Fund. In addition to her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees, she has completed postdoctoral fellowships at Northeastern University and at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University.
Select Publications
Roberts-Gregory, F. 2022. “A Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal: Challenges and Opportunities.” in Routledge Handbook on the Green New Deal. Kyla Tienhaara and Joanna Robinson (Eds.) New York, NY: Routledge.
Roberts-Gregory, F. 2021. “Climate Justice in the Wild n’ Dirty South: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Ecowomanism as Engaged Scholar-Activist Praxis before and during COVID-19.” Pp. 125-146 in Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. K Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk (Eds). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Roberts-Gregory, F. 2020. “Surviving Departmental Toxicity: An Autoethnographic Reflection of Navigating Gendered and Racialized Violence in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 8(2): 126-133.
Roberts-Gregory, F. 2020. “My Petrochemical Love.” Anthropology Newswebsite, April 22, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1387
Roberts-Gregory, F. 2020. “On Being the (Only) Black Feminist Environmental Ethnographer in Gulf Coast Louisiana.” Fieldnotes for Edge Effects: A Digital Magazine
Research Interests
Feminist political ecology
Feminist climate policy
Gender and climate change
Black geographies
UNFCCC climate negotiations
Education
- BA, Environmental Science, Sociology, and Anthropology, Spelman College
- PhD, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley
