UC Merced Through a Socio-Environmental Imagination Lens

Abstract

The socio-environmental imagination will be applied to the University of California, Merced, in hopes to understand the connection between society and UC Merced. UC Merced is located in Merced, California. It is the 10th university in the UC system and the first American research university of the 21st century. It has both undergraduate and graduate divisions. Consisting of three schools: Engineering, Natural Sciences, and the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts. There are currently two schools in the making, the E&J Gallo School of Management and a future medical school, which will begin enrolling students in 2023. UC Merced is the leading UC campus with the highest percentage of students from underrepresented ethnic/racial groups, low-income families, and first-generation students. I decided to choose UC Merced for my research because I am a first-generation, low-income, UC Merced student, and I wanted to add onto my knowledge of campus. The socio-environmental imagination can be seen as a framework that analyzes personal troubles as social issues which can then lead to environmental issues. This framework consists of three infrastructures. Those being cultural infrastructures (CI), material infrastructures (MI), and ecological infrastructures (EI). Cultural/social infrastructure refers to the organization of ideas, social norms, values, policies, and institutions. Material infrastructure is the organization of things to produce. This infrastructure focuses on building materials, scientific compounds, and the structure of a place. Ecological infrastructure refers to the ecology and environment. It is useful to know about the different infrastructures of the university since they impact the students culturally, financially, and environmentally. These factors impact the city of Merced, public policies, and people who do not attend the university. The socio-environmental imagination is important because it allows us to see how social issues can be interrelated to environmental justice problems. In this paper, I will apply the socioenvironmental imagination to UC Merced, in order to explore the interconnection between UC MERCED THROUGH A SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION LENS 3 society’s values to production and its corresponding environmental impacts on ecosystems and workers.