Hi, my name is Olivia Orosco and I am a PhD candidate in human geography whose research focuses on environmental justice, care work, race, gardens and plant relations.

The kid of two public school teachers, I grew up in a small farming town in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California. After a fellowship gap-year living in Sandiara, Senegal with Global Citizen Year (now renamed Tilting Futures), I went to undergrad at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon where I earned a degree in Environmental Science. It was there I started applying my life experience to community environmental justice (EJ) work, mostly with immigrant youth of color. After undergrad I worked at immigrant serving community organizations, first in Salem (where I also worked on a flower farm and learned floristry) and then in Tacoma, WA as I continued up the I-5 corridor.

I started my MA at the University of Washington in 2020. For my thesis I researched with undocumented home care aides from commitments I had pre-program, centering their experience during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This work allowed me to stretch my muscles as a community researcher and to practice grounded and intentional methods, which you can read more about in this Professional Geographer Article (please email me if you need access!). It also paved the way for my commitment to visual and artistic methods as more accessible modes of sharing information in my qualitative research practice. You can read more about this project in this UW Feature on my work (here for the Spanish version I translated for them).

Supported by a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, I have continued on to my PhD at the University of Washington where I am now a doctoral candidate. My dissertation builds from past EJ work, personal experience and community relationships to think about healing and place-making in cultivated urban garden spaces. Specifically, I have been interviewing and film photographing gardeners of color in the Seattle area to document the spaces they weave between memory and futurity and the plants that they tend. In this work I hope to build out a plant relation framework that moves beyond what Eve Tuck has described as damage-centered research, and I argue a starting point of EJ frameworks, and toward a celebration of desire-centered relationships with natural places.