Hello! My name is Maya Weeks. I am a climate justice geographer and poet. My interdisciplinary, mixed-methods work focuses on oceans, pollution, and land stewardship. A more detailed biography of mine is below.
Photo: Maya Weeks.
Plastic pollution on the west coast of Sweden. Photo: Maya Weeks.
Dr. Maya Weeks is a feminist political ecologist and poet who works on climate justice with a focus on oceans, pollution, and land stewardship especially through lenses attentive to gender equity and Indigenous rights. She prioritizes interdisciplinary co-produced and community-engaged research for healthy lands and waters. Maya is an affiliated researcher at the University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute and lecturer at Rutgers University. Previously, she served as a California Sea Grant State Fellow and the Director of Outreach and Development at the California Public Domain Allottee Association. A first-generation college graduate, Maya earned her B.A. in Language Studies (Spanish) from the University of California in Santa Cruz; her M.F.A. in Creative Writing (English) from Mills College; and her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California in Davis, where she wrote her dissertation on marine plastic pollution from a feminist environmental justice perspective using qualitative and creative methods funded by a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship at Bodega Marine Laboratory. She is a core member of the Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, where she co-leads the Science-Policy Interface Working Group. She serves on the boards of the American Association of Geographers’ Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group and New Cowgirl Camp and is a member of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory. She is of Belarusian, Polish, and unknown descent and is grateful to live and work on Northern Chumash and Salinan land.