Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Lindsey Dillon is a geographer, which is usually where people’s eyes glaze over. Geography... maps, capitals, something you memorized, mixed up, forgot. But evidently that’s not what it is and that's not what she does. Lindsey studies the places where we hide what we don't want to deal with: toxic leftovers, buried histories... and asks the question that tends to make people uncomfortable: why here, and why them, why you?
She earned her PhD at Berkeley looking at how race, waste, and space collide, tracing the long shadow of military and industrial contamination in San Francisco neighborhoods that were never treated as worth protecting. Her book, Toxic City, and yes - you can judge this book by it's cover, digs into redevelopment and environmental justice in a place that prides itself on being progressive while quietly reproducing the same old inequalities. The language around her work (political ecology, feminist geography, critical race theory) probably sounds unappealing to some, but she uses it like a set of tools, not decoration.
She also helped start the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) at a moment when people in power were actively making environmental data harder to find. The idea was simple: if information disappears, accountability disappears with it. The project earned national recognition, but more to the point, it did what it set out to do, keep the record intact.
Her work shows up in places like the American Journal of Public Health, Antipode, and Environment and Planning D, along with a range of interviews and profiles. At UC Santa Cruz, she’s an Associate Professor of Sociology and Undergraduate Education Chair, teaching courses that cross boundaries: social theory, environmental inequality, feminist methods.
None of that quite captures her, though.
It doesn’t tell you about the time she walked into San Quentin every week to co-teach a class, talking about James Baldwin with a kind of calm directness that cuts through the room. No performance, no distance, just presence and understaning. It doesn’t tell you about the losses she carries, her mother, her uncle, and how that history shows up not as something she leans on, but as something that quietly shapes how she refuses to look away.
As a mother to Charlie, she brings that same focus and clarity, no shortcuts, no easy answers. As a partner to me, she’s the kind of person who changes the atmosphere of a room without trying, who makes conversations stretch longer than they should because I dont want to leave. There’s nothing performative about her. What you see is what you get, and what you get is rare.
As a friend, she’s not the person who tells you everything will be fine. She’s the one who tells you the truth, and somehow makes that feel steadier than reassurance ever could.
Academia has plenty of people who study injustice from a comfortable distance. Lindsey isn’t one of them. She’s been in it, classrooms, communities, institutions, and she keeps showing up. The through line is simple: pay attention, tell the truth, don’t look away.
Finca Fiasco 2025
The thing about this shot is it captures what i can’t hold onto: Lindsey and Charlie, backlit against a city that’s just starting to make sense to the kid, or maybe never will. Every photograph I make carries the weight of every moment that made me capable of seeing this one. Every song that wrecked […]
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Finca Fiasco 2025
Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch I’ve been places. I’ve seen things. I’ve eaten meals that cost more than my first car and stood in front of art that makes you question everything you thought you knew […]
ReadResistance 2024
We met in prison. San Quentin, to be exact. Which sounds like the beginning of either a really good story or a really bad one, depending on your tolerance for irony. Turns out it was the former. When we were first dating she’s took me all around Hunters Point. The southeastern corner of San Francisco […]
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Finca Fiasco 2021
I’m not going to bullshit you about some mystical awakening or whatever the fuck people claim happens when they see big trees. But laying there on a bed of redwood needles looking up at five month old Charlie, this tiny perfect human who somehow shares my DNA, held by Lindsey in that cathedral of redwoods? […]
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Finca Fiasco 2021
Look at this photograph. Lindsey with Charlie at four and a half months. I took this picture and I remember thinking: I need to capture this. Not for Instagram, not for the baby book, not for some future slideshow at his wedding. I needed it for him. For later. For when he’s fifteen or twenty-five […]
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Finca Fiasco 2021
Week One Charlie, and here’s what nobody told me at the baby shower while they’re cooing over the organic onesies and making jokes about sleep deprivation like it’s some kind of sitcom punchline instead of the existential throat-punch it actually is: I’m not ready. I will NEVER be ready. And every single smiling face who […]
ReadResistance 2018
An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy, 2017 BUILD […]
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Wanderlust 2017
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Davenport Beach, it’s not some tourist trap with overpriced […]
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Resistance 2017
Some developer, Lennar, or “Five Points” when they want to sound like they give a shit about community, throws a “Grand Opening” for luxury townhouses called “Monarch.” Because of course they’re called Monarch. Because nothing says “we care about the people who’ve been living here for generations” like naming your overpriced boxes after royalty. And […]
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Wanderlust 2017
Look at this. Just… look at this. Lindsey… that face could stop traffic on Highway 1. The kind of beautiful that makes you forget what you were going to say. Natural, unforced, the real thing. And Sharka, with those soulful eyes, gorgeous in that way only dogs who’ve been loved properly can be. Cheap wine […]
ReadIndividualism 2017
Resistance: Ars Technica editors Annalee Newitz and Joe Mullin speak to UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon about how the Trump administration has been removing scientific and environmental data from the Web.
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Resistance 2017
Wanderlust 2016
Look at her. Lindsey sitting there in that fourth frame like she’s the only thing holding the world together, like she’s the reason the wind bothers to blow across that grass. You know what I’m talking about, that particular quality certain people have where they don’t just occupy space, they complete it. The Halprins knew. […]
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Engineering 2016
Buildings without foundations will inevitably come down. I can be fooled, but my kids won’t be… either we will correct what’s wrong, it will be corrected for us. James Baldwin, Take This Hammer We’re real good at forgetting where we buried the bodies. Or in this case, where we buried the plutonium. Hunters Point. Say […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2015
Let me way this. I was 22 when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt i was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, […]
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