Climate change — its impact on health and society — continues to shape Associate Professor Ali Kenner’s work and has led to her next project: establishing a monthly climate café at Drexel. It has also influenced the creation of a new course in Experimental Ethnography.
The course will be co-taught in the spring of 2025 with Jen Britton, executive director of Drexel’s Sustainable Development Strategy, as part of next year's Pennoni Honors Symposium: Black & White. The class will teach students methods and techniques that can be used to design projects that tackle complex topics, like living and coping with climate change. As a research approach, Kenner has used experimental ethnography to open and shift conversations in and out of the classroom.
“When you are teaching about climate change, you need to know how to work with the grief and anxiety students are experiencing because of it,” Kenner said. “Talking about climate is super heavy. There’s loss of species, forced migration. Teaching about climate increasingly requires we delve into the psychology of death, dying, grief and bereavement.”
The strong emotions evoked by weather-related destruction also prompted Kenner to organize a climate café with Britton and their colleague, Bo Solomon, executive director of Climate and Sustainability at Drexel.
A new but growing concept across the globe, climate cafés serve as a place where people gather to exchange ideas on climate change, discuss ways to take action as well as cope with its disquieting realities. Drexel’s first climate café is scheduled for May 8 at the Lindy Center, with a monthly café scheduled to start in September.
“In this space, we plan to talk about experiences, frustrations and grief,” Kenner said.
While solutions and ways to take action to ease the effects of climate change won’t be at the forefront of conversations, there will be information on hand to direct attendees to the many proactive efforts happening at Drexel and Philadelphia at large.
Interdisciplinary Collaborations
Kenner joined Drexel in 2013 as an associate professor in the Department of Politics, with a joint appointment in the Center for Science, Technology and Society (STS) in the College of Arts & Sciences (CoAS). Her work focuses on the politics of science, technology and energy in society, and those interests have led her to the broader issues of climate change, urban politics and asthma.
Energy Rights Project (ERP) and Climate Ready Philly are examples of the interdisciplinary collaborations Kenner leads with teams of scientists, engineers, students, and community and industry partners. ERP is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research investigation that explores energy vulnerability in the Mid-Atlantic and how organizations and government policies facilitate affordable access to water, electricity and heating fuel and the health implications of that access on vulnerable communities.
An Energy Rights Project workshop in August 2021
The work with ERP took Kenner and a small team of students to three events in November 2023 in the Northeast and Germantown neighborhoods of Philadelphia. While tabling at these events, they polled residents about whether they would consider converting home cooking and heating appliances from gas to electric and whether they were familiar with recent conversations about affordably electrifying homes.
ERP’s November fieldwork was conducted for Philadelphia’s Clean Community Energy Coalition (CCEC), which is led by the Energy Coordinating Agency (ECA), a Philadelphia nonprofit focused on energy transition. It is the most recent project in a collaboration that began in 2014, when Kenner and ECA staff worked together to host climate education workshops in community centers throughout the city.
Philadelphia’s CCEC launched a year ago when ECA, along with Drexel’s Environmental Collaboratory and Academy of Natural Sciences, as well as Philadelphia Energy Authority, Solar Stewards and Hunting Park Community Development Corporation, received an American-Made Challenges prize through the National Renewable Energy Lab. The Coalition continues to work on strategies to tackle energy inequity using electrification technologies and the city’s long-standing Neighborhood Energy Centers.
Practical Experience
Maleah Eusebio, who is graduating this year with a bachelor's degree in public health and matriculating this fall into Drexel’s Master of Public Health program; and Arthi Sivendra, a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major who will also graduate this June, served as research assistants on the ERP team.
Both Sivendra and Eusebio helped to poll residents last November. During the experience, they learned first-hand how to approach and analyze data collected during community-based research and helped Kenner write a report for the Coalition.
“It was an incredible, practical experience,” Sivendra said. “It was my first time dipping my toe into this type of research, and it was amazing to get community input on what they were experiencing since they are the ones who know the most about what is going on in their own community.”
“I’ve always been interested in public health and population health and how individual health can be impacted by societal factors,” Eusebio said. “I have focused on analyzing the relationship between energy insecurity and medical vulnerability and it has been very interesting.”
Two information sheets that Eusebio and Sivendra created for the November events will be reprinted in The 33rd, an annual anthology published by Drexel’s Department of English & Philosophy, which is used in the First-Year Writing program.
A student doing fieldwork
Climate, Community at the Forefront
Kenner’s earlier work, Climate Ready Philly, also focused on community education. The workshop series used both climate and learning science to teach Philadelphians about the local impacts of climate change, including health risks. The project ran out of the Philadelphia Health and Environment Ethnography Lab (PHEEL) at Drexel, which Kenner led for six years before closing it in 2020.
During the time she led PHEEL, Kenner trained more than forty Drexel students in experimental ethnography while working on Philadelphia-based projects with government entities and community organizations. PHEEL, which Kenner is considering resurrecting next year, worked with the Clean Air Council, Energy Coordinating Agency, as well as with two Drexel alumni — Deepa Mankikiar, director of public health programs at PHMC, and Alexandra Skula, program manager at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. These past projects helped Kenner in her role as a Provost Solutions Fellow, which focuses on expanding research and curricular collaborations with external partners.
Kenner has taken her approach beyond Drexel’s campus and Philadelphia’s community centers. Last year she was awarded an NSF conference grant, which funded a writing workshop for early career researchers from the Global South and historically underrepresented institutions. Kenner worked with a transnational team of journal editors to host the two-day workshop, including fellow editors at Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, the ambitious open-access journal that just won the 2024 STS Infrastructure Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science.
Forever a Student
While spearheading research projects is integral to her work, Kenner is passionate about teaching. At Drexel, she has been recognized with the Allen Rothwarf Award for Teaching Excellence and the CoAS Teaching Excellence Award.
Kenner teaches courses on climate change, feminist political theory, and the politics of environmental health. She formats courses using peer collaboration, project-based learning (PBL) and feminist pedagogy, which fosters a classroom environment that empowers students, encourages self-discovery and community building.
“I love teaching. It is the thing that gives me life,” she said in a recent interview for this article. “I also love being a student. I am constantly finding new technology to bring into my work as a teacher and researcher. I want my classes to challenge students and open them up to bigger narratives that help them figure out who they are and what they want to do in the world.”
Kenner drew from that same philosophy to find her own passions. After leaving high school in her junior year to attend community college, Kenner earned an associate degree and later enrolled in State University of New York at Albany where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and master’s in Women’s Studies. There she was mentored by Virginia Eubanks, an associate professor of Political Science who enlightened Kenner on participatory action research (PAR).
“I was really interested in working with community members to create projects that could be transformative for the community and the people living in those communities,” she said. “I became very interested in how we act within an environment.”
That led her to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she received a doctorate degree in Science and Technology Studies in 2011. Her dissertation was a spin-off of a larger project called The Asthma Files, an experiment in which interdisciplinary researchers from around the globe convened to use an open-source research platform to design novel ethnographic approaches to complex environmental health problems such as asthma.
The Asthma Files lives on and remains an active forum; it also laid the foundation for Kenner’s first book: “Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change,” which was published in 2018. From wildfires to pollution and smog, asthma is being exacerbated by climate and considered a global epidemic. The book explores the complexity of the health issue, the lived experiences of those who struggle to breathe and five methods of asthma care across different socio cultures.
“I’m very interested in breathing and sensory experiences within an environment, and how we feel the environment through the air we are breathing,” Kenner said. “Air quality can give us different experiences in our body. People with asthma have taught us this. But now, I think that kind of place-based, sensory knowledge is becoming more and more important with climate change.”