Yanin Kramsky

Spatial politics; political ecology; environmental knowledge, power, and planning; critical environmental and climate justice; intersectional feminism; crip, queer, and transgender theories and geographies.

Yanin Kramsky (they/them) works at the intersection of disaster governance, social vulnerability, environmental justice, queer and critical disability theory, and material feminism. They combine political, linguistic, and visual modes of analysis to investigate how 'social vulnerability'—an ambiguous, contested, and malleable concept that indexes various facets of personal and public life—becomes a tool of governance during disasters.

Yanin’s research examines the sites where 'social vulnerability' is constructed, negotiated, reified, and normalized, particularly at the interface between bureaucratic initiatives and the activism, advocacy, and lived experiences of 'vulnerable subjects.' This interface reveals how disasters, specifically wildfires in Northern California, affect individuals whose mental and bodily experiences fall outside societal norms, especially when interpretations of vulnerability diverge.

Additionally, Yanin studies how state agencies and corporate actors biopolitically govern people with non-normative bodyminds, and the forms of subjectivity that emerge as unprecedented wildfires create new opportunities for technocratic interventions in the daily lives of marginalized communities. They explore the techniques, strategies, and rationalities of wildfire governance through which individuals with access and functional needs are differentially valued based on their mental and bodily capabilities and capacities. Yanin highlights how wildfire management and planning produce sites of collaboration, contestation, or refusal for 'vulnerable' groups, particularly those with bodies and minds outside normative frameworks, while also considering the broader power structures that shape their experiences as they navigate the wildfire 'riskscape.' Yanin’s research provides implementable findings for planners and policymakers as the scale, frequency, and volatility of disasters grow with anthropogenic climate change, and as vulnerable populations increasingly navigate the maze of official guidance, ad hoc governance, and self-directed resilience measures. Through their work, Yanin seeks to re-center ethical frameworks, relational values toward Nature, and the multidisciplinary forms of knowledge production required to move the environmental field beyond technocratic optimism.

Yanin earned their PhD in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, with designated emphases in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Global Metropolitan Studies. Before their doctoral work, Yanin completed a Master of Environmental Science at Yale University, where they focused on environmental justice issues. Prior to graduate school, they studied industrial design and illustration at ArtCenter College of Design and worked as a design consultant while teaching youth about sustainable design practices.

CYPLAN 110: Introduction to City Planning
CYPLAN 119: Planning for Sustainability
DEVENG 206: Ethical Reflection and Portfolio Building

GWS 138: Gender and Capitalism, GSI
CYPLAN 201B: Planning Methods Gateway, GSI
CYPLAN 118AC: The Urban Community, GSI
GWS 100AC: American Cultures: Settler Colonialism, Wilderness, Women/Gender, and the American West, Reader

Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, UC Berkeley, 2024
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley, 2024
Research Presentation Award, Association of American Geographers, Legal Geography Specialty Group, 2022
Research Presentation Award, Yale School of the Environment Research Conference, 2017
Student Leadership Award, ArtCenter College of Design, 2011

Chancellor’s Fellowship, UC Berkeley, 2017 to 2021
Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Department of City & Regional Planning, UC Berkeley, 2021
Research Grant, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley, 2021
Perloff Family Fellowship, UC Berkeley, 2019
Summer Research Fellowship, Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, 2018
Summer Research Grant, Global Metropolitan Studies, UC Berkeley, 2018
Research Fellowship, Hixon Center for Urban Ecology, Yale University, 2016

Crysler, C. Greig, Yanin Kramsky, Chandra M. Laborde, and Stathis G. Yeros. 2024. “Spatializing Queer Ecologies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, edited by Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi.

Kramsky, Yanin. 2022. “Letter to a Grandfather Not Long Gone.” In Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource by and for Transgender Communities, edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth, 2nd ed., 64–65. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kramsky, Yanin. 2017. “Youth Taking the Reins: Empowering At-Risk Teens to Shape Environmental Challenges through Design Thinking.” Children, Youth and Environments 27, no. 3: 103–23.

Kramsky, Yanin. 2017. “Empowering At-Risk Teens to Shape Environmental Challenges with Design.” Sage Magazine: Justice Out of Place, August 17.

Kramsky, Yanin. 2016. “Wastewater in Delhi: Not All Viewpoints Are Equal.” Review of Ways of Knowing the Wastewaterscape: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Wastewater in Delhi, India by Timothy Karpouzoglou and Anna Zimmer. Yale Environment Review, October 13.

Kramsky, Yanin. 2016. “The Power of Neighborhood-Scale Actions—and Urban Agriculture—in New Orleans.” Review of Community Gardening and Governance over Urban Nature in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward by Catarina Passidomo. Yale Environment Review, April 21.