Discover the connections between climate, energy, people, and the environment during this free public keynote discussion panel, hosted at the Arboretum in partnership with the Penn State Department of Geography. The discussion will feature Jola Ajibade of Emory University, Conor Harrison of the University of South Carolina, and Kelly Kay of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The keynote panel is the public event of the 14th annual Nature-Society Workshop, a two-day gathering of faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students working in geography and related fields. Penn State’s Department of Geography is hosting this year’s workshop, bringing participants together around research at the intersection of environmental and social science.
Speakers
Jola Aijibade
Jola Aijibade, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Emory University and an urban political ecologist whose research examines how societies can respond to global environmental change while addressing inequalities that leave some communities more vulnerable than others. Her work includes climate adaptation, managed retreat, urban greening, disaster resilience, and renewable energy transitions, with a focus on how environmental interventions affect people, institutions, labor, and places. Ajibade also works with grassroots organizations and international partners on justice-centered approaches to climate adaptation and environmental governance. She was a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report and has consulted for the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Health Organization-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. Her research has appeared in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Conor Harrison
Conor Harrison, Ph.D., is an associate professor of geography at the University of South Carolina. He studies the political economy of energy, including the roles of finance, infrastructure, markets, and inequality in shaping energy systems. His recent research focuses on changes in the US electricity system and the growing influence of financial institutions in the energy transition. His 2026 book, Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System, examines how finance has shaped utility deregulation, coal-plant closures, and the expansion of solar energy. Harrison is also studying rising electricity demand associated with artificial intelligence and data centers and what that growth could mean for the development and governance of the electric grid.
Kelly Kay
Kelly Kay, Ph.D., is an associate professor of geography at UCLA. She studies the political economy of the environment and nature-society geography, with a focus on land and resource use in North America. Her current research includes the acquisition of timberland by financial investors and its effects on timber-dependent communities, just transitions and the Los Angeles Green New Deal and Native Hawaiian efforts to reclaim water rights following the end of plantation sugar production on Maui. Her current book project, Landscapes of Finance: Time, Timber, and the Fate of US Forest-Dependent Communities, investigates how changing patterns of timberland ownership are reshaping rural communities and relationships with forests.