How do social actors—groups of people united around one cause—do the work of translating keywords across vastly different problems, places, and times? More concretely, how might a pervasive and powerful keyword of environmental justice and activism—sacrifice zones—enable insight into those processes of translation and transition? A genealogy of this keyword of environmental justice speaks to broader processes of how everyday people use powerful ideas to see, name, and dispute the pervasive logics of expendability core to modern political and economic activity. I propose to use the Wolf Fellowship colloquium year to build my skills in tracing the movement of sacrifice zones as a keyword, and answer questions about problem definition, agency, and conditions for social change.