- Angela Davis
“Radical simply means grasping things at the root.”
Welcome
I’m Beth, a PhD candidate at Colorado State University working at the intersections of critical environmental history, fat studies, disability studies, and environmental justice.
My Approach
Collaborative
My work is grounded in collaboration across disciplines, identities, and lived experiences.
Whether I'm co-authoring research on inclusive biology education or engaging with complex historical narratives in the feminist political ecology lab I join, I prioritize dialogue and shared inquiry.
I believe that meaningful scholarship, activism, and pedagogy emerge from collective effort, especially when it centers marginalized voices and challenges dominant frameworks.
Framework
My work is rooted in disability studies, fat studies, settler colonial critique, and decolonial theory, with a strong grounding in environmental justice.
I examine how systems of oppression shape relationships to land, body, and nature, especially through historical and contemporary conservation practices.
By centering marginalized perspectives, I aim to challenge dominant narratives and foster more inclusive, liberatory approaches to environmental thought and action.
Herd Mentality: The Story of Wildlife Management and Eugenics
US conservation history is typically retold from a Western perspective and has established iconic figures as founders who came to prominence during the conception of the conservation movement. However, another immensely impactful movement was growing concurrently in the US, eugenics.
In this interactive lecture, the historical conservation figures who supported eugenics are profiled to expose how eugenics and conservation both aimed to engineer a future in which white American settlers would dominate the land through a logic of elimination. I argue that eugenic logics have always been and continue to be a part of the conservation movement.
Recent Talks
Fingerprints of the Past
“The fingerprints of scientists of the past are all over the work we do today. It matters to know who they were, what they did and where we come from.” - Beth Wittmann
This presentation tailored to statistics and mathematics academics brings critical science history to the foreground. Audiences leave with a greater understanding of eugenics, its influence in math and stats, and its impact on America in the 1900s to the present.
Sick of the City: Conservation, Colonialism, and he Making of the “Healthy” Body
This interactive lecture takes a critical disability and fat justice lens to the history of American conservation to complicate the ideal that going outside makes one healthy.
Attendees learn about how wilderness was established as an instrument to define and refine wealthy white male bodies in service to white supremacy during the Progressive Era. With this foundation, we track a through line of ways that ableism and sizeism have gone unchecked in outdoor culture.
