Hello! My name is Maya Weeks. I am a geographer and poet. My interdisciplinary, mixed-methods work focuses on oceans, pollution, gender, and pastoralism. 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 oceans, pollution, gender, and pastoralism in the face of climate change from an environmental justice perspective. She prioritizes interdisciplinary co-produced and community-engaged research as well as public scholarship stewarding healthy lands and waters. Maya is an affiliated researcher at the University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute and lecturer at Rutgers University. A first-generation college student, Maya earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California in Davis, where she wrote her dissertation on marine plastic pollution and feminist political economy using qualitative and creative methods funded by a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship at Bodega Marine Laboratory. Maya holds her M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College and her B.A. in Language Studies (Spanish) from the University of California in Santa Cruz. Prior to teaching at Rutgers, Maya served as a California Sea Grant State Fellow and the Director of Outreach and Development at the California Public Domain Allottee Association. She is a member of the Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty and the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory and serves on the Board of the Association of American Geographers’ Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group and the Advisory Board of New Cowgirl Camp. She is grateful to live and work on yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash and Salinan land.