This spoken word piece summarises the environmental justice framework and ethos guiding “Climates of Resistance”. The full transcript is available on YouTube.

This interdisciplinary course critiques systemic environmental inequalities with particular attention to the experiences – and active resistance – of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour in the 21st century. Students will start by examining the concepts of intersectionality and systemic injustice to position themselves within current structures. The course’s three main units are then structured around key pillars in the environmental justice movement: distribution, recognition, and participation. 

Participants will explore a variety of contexts and can choose to focus on particular issues and/or communities through their work. Case studies range from anti-gold mining efforts in Pascua-Lama on the Chilean border with Argentina to Indigenous Islanders fighting sea level rise in Oceania; guest speakers represent anti-racist projects as diverse as fog-harvesting in rural Morocco and urban gardening in the southern United States.

The first unit of Climates of Resistance is a (dis)orientation to racism, studying global issues, and the course. 

“Orientation” has several related meanings.

• Firstly, “familiarisation with something”, which will be done through the introduction of the course set-up, core concepts for study, and the building of a shared vocabulary for the class.

• Secondly, “the determination of the relative position of something or someone (especially oneself)”. This unit also asks students to consider how they impact and are impacted by environmental racism due to values, privileges, and disadvantages.

• “Orientation” can also refer to “a person’s basic attitude, beliefs, or feelings in relation to a particular subject or issue”. The introductory unit to this course is meant to be a disorientation as much as an orientation, leading participants to question what they know about racism in the United States and around the world.

By the end of Unit 1, students will be able to explain how intersectionality – the combination of race, class, gender, sexuality, presumed (dis)ability, and other identity factors – functions within (in)justice.

This unit launches the course’s exploration of environmental justice, through which lens participants will pursue Learning Objective 2 in order to compare similarities and differences between the environmental inequities experienced by various marginalised people in the US and around the world, especially Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Pasifika, and diasporic Asian communities. 

Unit 2 investigates distributive (in)justice around environmental costs and benefits. Through a variety of skills-based workshops, conversations with guest speakers, and case study examinations, the course will be:

• Measuring Inequality to appreciate the need for evidence-based policymaking and advocacy around issues in environmental racism;

• Appraising Access to identify realities in the (mis)use and provision of food, water, energy, and other environmental resources; and

• Segregating Risks to determine how environmental harms are unequally experienced by groups, often with systemic intent.

By the end of Unit 2, participants will be able to evaluate evidence-based patterns of environmental racism. Students will be invited to demonstrate their understanding of these trends through a Statistical Story (Disparate Distribution Data).

Unit 3 begins the group’s consideration of procedural justice by examining how various actors are (not) acknowledged within policy spaces and environmental movements.

Students in the course will focus on:

• Dismantling Dichotomies to break down false dichotomies that reproduce unequal power dynamics in human-nature relations;

• Examining Portrayals to unpack the way racism and anthropocentrism are reflected in and reproduced by entertainment; and

• Changing Narratives to experience the power of emotive storytelling through art for creating empathy and impacting change.

Unit 3 uses critical theories of power to expand students’ understanding of who the stakeholders are in environmental planning and ecological conditions. After discussing a number of non-traditional actors and considering how those underrepresented players might affect (and/or be affected by) environmental (in)justice, students will select one of them to showcase through Agency Artwork (Radical Recognition Report). This assignment will demonstrate students’ ability to recognise, interpret, and amplify expressions of non-traditional agency produced by underrepresented stakeholders in environmental action and policy. 

The course’s fourth unit addresses a more formal dimension of procedural justice, scrutinising mechanisms and identifying strategies for civic engagement in environmental policymaking.

Students will engage in legal simulations, interview community leaders, and participate in hands-on workshops taught by community organisations to learn about:

• (Dis)Enfranchising People to evaluate the protections – and gaps – found in formal systems for civic engagement in decision-making;

• Utilising Law to support community involvement in planning and be able to protect environmental activists from reprisal; and

• Leveraging Grassroots to intervene for environmental justice when governments and official infrastructures have failed.

By the end of Unit 4, participants will be able to apply problem-solving techniques and collective action theories in order to design effective community campaigns that redress environmental racism. The final assignment for Climates of Resistance allows students to do this directly through a Community Campaign (Public Participation Plan).

Climates of Resistance ends where it began: with a reflection on where we are and want to be in regard to environmental racism, as individuals and a collective. During the course’s final unit, students will return to their thoughts from the initial orientation sessions, considering what has and has not changed for them in terms of their position. Class discussions will focus on theories of solidarity and various takes on ‘allyship’ as we work on:

• Redistributing Power to analyse claims and aims for sovereignty amidst imperialism, gerrymandering, and colonisation;

• Transforming Solidarity to consider our own positions within racist structures and identify how we can work against oppressive systems; and

• Showcasing Insights to celebrate our Climates of Resistance community and share our learning from the semester with a wider audience.

By the end of Unit 5, students will be able to explain how intersectional injustices in environmental structures impact marginalised individuals and communities and will have the capacity to interpret and contribute to various means of collective action against environmental racism. The course will conclude with a Public Symposium at which participants are encouraged to present their favourite piece(s) of work from the semester.