After defending his dissertation, “Appalachian Anthropocene: Conflict and Subject Formation in a Sacrifice Zone”, Gabriel accepted a position with the Prison Ecology Project where he helped coordinate multiple projects addressing environmental injustice in the US’s mass incarceration system with a national network of collaborators, including currently and previously incarcerated people, community activists, academics, journalists, and students. There is a video of him discussing this work at a panel at the World-Ecology Research Network Conference at Binghamton University in 2017. He then accepted a position with the Diversity Center of Northeast Ohio in Cleveland, OH where he designed and facilitated diversity & inclusion workshops for K-12 educators, administrators, and students and consulted on policies & procedures, curriculum, and parent and community engagement. Gabriel left that position and founded Big Sky Education and Strategy where he initially continued his work around DEI issues in K-12 schools and universities. With the arrival of the COVID pandemic and the closure of most schools, he and his colleagues pivoted to providing remote workshops and consultation for various organizations including working with Bennington College to execute a project asset-mapping the regional food system (his personal gratitude to CS grad Brian Murphy for this connection) and a series of DEI workshops for the Association of Maine Archives and Museums. Beginning in 2021, Gabriel accepted his current position as the Director of Community Initiatives at Indiana University’s Center for Rural Engagement where he serves as the PI on a small number of state-wide projects and manages a team of community liaisons. He serves as PI on a public health project addressing disparities in COVID-related health outcomes in for the Hispanic/Latinx community in a rural Indiana county and leads the creation of a report assessing the feasibility of a statewide “Heritage Trail” highlighting underrepresented histories across the state. Additionally, the team he supervises supports a wide range of projects addressing issues in rural Indiana spanning health, arts and culture, sustainability, and more. Details on that work are cataloged on the CRE’s website.
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