AFROAM 293G. From Environmental Racism to Climate Justice

3 credits

Professor Losier

MW 11:15-12:30 p.m., NAH Theater Room (03)

This course explores the emergence of the modern environmental justice movement in the United States during the 1980s and 90s, with a key focus on its impact on the more recent emergence of a worldwide struggle for climate justice. It will note how the EJ movement coined the term “environmental racism” and made calls for unique approaches to knowledge production, participatory democracy, and environmental sustainability. More specifically, this course focuses on the emergence of a broad network of grassroots organizations – “a movement of movements” – that reoriented what the environment and what justice are understood to mean amongst Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities over the past four decades. This course will also pay particular attention to the ways in which these ideas around the environment and justice continue to shape the development of climate activism, both in the United States and around the world, with a key focus on how those involved in this activism have also come to understand themselves as part of a broad network of grassroots struggles highlighting the local impacts of climate change. From here, this course will examine key facets of today’s climate movement, including the fight pipelines, the struggle against disaster capitalism, the conceptualization of the Anthropocene, and how growing debates around militarism, decolonization, ecosocialism, and industrial sabotage.