CASE HISTORY

The idea to create a campus community around the concern for sustainability and environmental justice was seeded by an all-day Climate Literacy Event sponsored by the OU American Studies Program on October 15, 2015. It was there that a number of us faculty met each other for the first time and came to know of our mutual concern around climate change and the need to shift our educational priorities accordingly.

It was not until 2017, however, that a core of us, led by Jeffrey Insko from the English Department, managed to come together and organize a CETL Learning Community around the theme, “Teaching in the Anthropocene” (advertised under the friendlier title, “Engaging the Environment”). As part of that endeavor, we co-sponsored, along with the American Studies Colloquium, a public lecture by distinguished Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte who spoke on the subject, "Indigenous Climate Justice Movements: From the Right to be Cold to Resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline.”

From that initial caucus, it would take two more years, in the summer of 2019, before another core of us, namely, Laura Landolt (Political Science), Mozhgon Rajee (Human Health Sciences), and S. Lily Mendoza (Communication), along with James “Jim” Perkinson, (Communication adjunct faculty), managed to resume talking among ourselves about committing to something more sustained in light of the growing severity of the climate crisis. We agreed to meet at the start of the Fall 2019 semester, taking advantage of the scheduled Global Climate Strike (Sept. 20-27) to make a strong statement and galvanize coalition-building efforts.

For our Fall 2019 kick-off event, we sought to create a big splash by hosting a film discussion on the Extinction Rebellion Movement in the UK. The best science we know tells us that we are now headed into the Sixth Great Mass Extinction as a result of human-caused climate change—a global apocalypse that will not stop short of our own species, if radical change is not immediately forthcoming. The film covering the organizing meeting of Extinction Rebellion lays out the science and calls on citizen groups to rise up and demand that governments not go on with business as usual, but treat the crisis as the emergency it is and mobilize and alter course accordingly. Without truthful and honest educating of the public, the upheaval will likely trigger massive social violence. Once industrial infrastructure begins collapsing, and more and more people experience food scarcity, flooding, uncontrolled fires, outbreak of disease epidemics, etc. the worst ideologies of scapegoating (of immigrants, people of color, impoverished folk and other minoritized populations), will go bail for more just mitigation of the crisis. We were convinced that it is crucial to begin educating youth and students now for what is almost inevitably coming down in the near future, as well as prepare them for the long-term for a very much changed world.

The kick-off event was a resounding success, drawing not only faculty, but also students, staff, and community members.

An initial call to form a Faculty Alliance for Climate and the Environment (FACE) that would serve as the vehicle for our climate organizing on campus brought together nine (9) interdisciplinary faculty, namely, Laura Landolt (Political Science), Mozhgon Rajaee (Human Health Sciences), Erin Myers (Communication), Alan Epstein (Political Science), James Perkinson (Communication), Aubrey Arain (Environmental Health Science), Cody Eldredge (Political Science), Andrea Knutson (English), and S. Lily Mendoza (Communication). Others who would join us later were Scott Tiegs (Biology), Jeff Insko (English), and Shannan McNair (Education).

As plans for more sustained organizing got underway, the core organizing committee realized the need to expand our umbrella organization to include other sectors of the campus community beyond just the faculty; hence, the change from FACE to FSSACE (Faculty-Staff-Student Alliance for Climate and the Environment). Monthly meetings (with pizza donations from faculty members) were held featuring in-house presentations from different FSSACE members on their various research and advocacy projects (as requested by the student members), Working Group Committee discussions, reports, and visioning. These were usually held in person (courtesy of Scholarly Communications Librarian Julia Rodriguez who reserved a room in the library for us) every second Tuesday of the month until the COVID-19 pandemic struck and forced everything to shift online.

When the FSSACE acronym proved a challenge to remember, the alternative name, CASE (Campus Alliance for Sustainability and the Environment) was suggested and approved by acclamation.

In the Summer of 2020, a number of us were invited to work with OU’s Sustainability Action Plan Committee as part of the Re-Imagining OU project under the Office of the President (namely, Scott, Mozhgon, Jeff, Holly, and Lily). We’re looking forward to continuing the work we started as the Administration commits to providing more institutional support for the task.

In its relatively short two-year existence, CASE-OU has become a vibrant community of over 100 faculty-scholars, staff, students, and community members exchanging knowledge, on-the-ground experience, and out-of-the-box thinking, learning, and inspiration in seeking to re-imagine how we might do education differently in a time of great transformation and challenge.

We believe that universities, as “centers of learning,” play a big part in grappling with climate change. To the degree that the crisis of climate change is not merely a technological one, but also a crisis of culture, it requires a re-examination of our founding narratives and worldview presuppositions, including the role of biodiversity in planetary health and human flourishing. It pushes the envelope and compels us to ask about the role of our species in the mix: why are we here?

In this regard, we see working for disciplinary and curricular transformation as a crucial avenue to continuing exploration of such a question. The task is complex and daunting, requiring us to go beyond the comfort of our received paradigms and breach the silos of our disciplinary specializations. In seeking to arrive at more integrative and holistic solutions to problems created by old ways of "doing knowledge," we need courage to explore unchartered epistemic territories and dare to ask hard questions. These include some of the more difficult and embattled issues of our time, such as how race and racism affect climate impacts, the role of ideologies of “progress,” limitless advancement, and infinite growth in collapsing biodiversity, the legacy of different understandings of land relations (private property, shared commons, indigenous belonging, etc.), the consequences of the different kinds of stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be human.

CASE-OU has been a hospitable place for us to have these kinds of challenging conversations. In the process of getting to know one another in our differing giftings, life experiences, intellectual temperaments and orientations, we have become a true learning community committed to the shared goal of working for a more ecologically sustainable and just world.

We invite you to come join and learn with us!