Maywa Montenegro

Environmental Studies I ENVS 178 Race & the Environment I Spring 2025

Maywa Montenegro, a faculty member in Environmental Studies, combines theories and methods from political ecology and Science and Technology Studies to teach courses primarily focused on food systems change.

In Spring 2025, she taught a new course, "Race & the Environment" (ENVS 178), which introduces undergraduate students to the entangled forces of coloniality, racism, and capitalism as they shape global environments, and vice-versa. Drawing on sources that center the expertises and perspectives of Indigenous, Black, Brown, and other racialized communities, students explore how racialization occurs through imperial violence to ecologies and their human and non-human inhabitants. They study long arcs of colonial science and power to understand how nature has been normalized as an object of ownership, extraction, pollution, and control.

In essence, the course constitutes "a difficult conversation" from the vantage point of settler science and dominant systems of knowledge production within and beyond the university.

To help students navigate these conversations with empathy, reflexivity, and openness to being unsettled, Montenegro utilized the TLC guidelines alongside principles from anticolonial science (Liboiron 2021), decolonizing methodologies (Tuhiwai-Smith 2021), and participatory action research (Fals Borda 1987; Wakeford and Sanchez Rodriguez 2018).

pausing to self-reflect

In a class of 35 students, small group conversations were a central component of the learning community. But before going into groups, pauses for self-reflection were key. As the TLC guidelines note, challenging material often requires time for students to pause and consider their own feeling, emotions, interpretations, and questions. Montenegro regularly incorporated "2-minute papers" or "think breaks" before students gathered in small groups. Useful prompts for these pauses included:

What emotions does the case study raise for you? What questions are you grappling with?
What perspectives on, or responses to, these cases studies will you bring to your small group?

decolonizing is not a metaphor

While students strengthened their dialoguing skills, the class underlined that decolonization is never purely dialogical. Drawing from Tuck and Yang (2019), Liboiron (2021), and other Indigenous scholars, Montenegro introduced students to the argument that decolonization, at core, is about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. It is not a synonym for other things we may wish to achieve such as social justice, environmental justice, or cultural inclusivity.

Young people across the US have witnessed the proliferation of decolonizing narratives at school, in the media, and in popular culture. Many feel the concept has been watered down but aren't sure what to do about it. Students in ENVS 178 were therefore particularly keen to explore techniques described by Hill et al. (2021) for decolonizing environmental studies research. In small groups, they worked through:

(1) "Becoming" - identifying sources of power and privilege

(2) "Unlearning" - intentionally “reduce[ing] the influence of old knowledge for the sake of creating new knowledge and/or patterns of thinking” (Griswold et al. 2017)

(3) Relearning - bringing other voices and epistemologies to the center of the research process. "Two-eyed seeing" as an example.

Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk in Mi’kmaw) embraces “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all” – Reid et al. 2020

journaling to clarify thinking

Assignment-wise, the course was partly anchored in reflective-analytical journaling. As TLC guidelines describe, "Reflective journaling, used in specific lesson plans or consistently throughout a course, can encourage self-reflection and provide students with time to process information or prepare for discussions." Montenegro asked students to submit 8 journals over the 10- week quarter. In each journal entry, student were asked to summarize a text's argument; pose a discussion question, begin responding to the question, and give evidence to support this response.

These journals created an incentive to complete the reading, which was essential for constructive in-class dialogue. As importantly, they offered a space for students to wrestle with the material prior to engaging with one another. Montenegro found that student journals were incredibly rich in probing divisive issues—be it the battle over the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea or the inevitability of AI. Students seemed to clarify their own thinking through these journals, resulting in more meaningful and empirically grounded conversations and research papers.

emotional work

The science of learning upon which the TLC guide is based has long documented that learning is not only a matter of amassing concepts.

“[W]e know that topics related to race, racism, and racial justice often require emotional capacity and interpersonal skills that are just as important to the learning process. Indeed, affective learning goals related to race point to an entirely different set of skills that must be acquired...” (Harbin, Thurber & Bandy 2021).

To this end, in the student co-facilitated classes and in the final projects, I invited students to lean into affective registers of learning.

Art was very helpful here, as it gave students another mode of expression. Students used markers and butcher paper, for example, to hand-draw the "house of modernity" (Andreotti 2020), placing their scenarios within the walls of Enlightenment Humanism and the Nation State, atop the foundation of separation, and beneath the roof of global capitalism. One student team drew the entire house upside down, illustrating how the house could be decolonized, inverted all the structures that currently support the dominant system.

deep interdisciplinarity

The final project combined research and art—a drawing, painting, poem, film, installation, digital map, zine, etc. As scholarship shows, efforts to combine science and art in environmental studies have made progress in traversing disciplinary borders, but still often inferiorize art; it is 'fun' part relative to science requiring intellectual skill. To fend against this tendency, Montenegro invited Jorge Antonio Palacios to guest lecture for the class. An artist from Yanawana/San Antonio, Texas, with roots in Central Mexico, Palacios is trained as a glassblower and anthropologist. They hold a B.F.A. in glass from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a B.S. in astrophysics from Brown University, an M.A. in social sciences from University of Chicago, and an MFA of Environmental Art and Social Practice from UCSC. In class, Palacios shared various forms of digital design, soil-encased glassblowing, weaving, painting, video games, and landscape art with students, showing how they combine theories of technology, colonialism, and speculative utopias in studies of borderlands. They walked us their their upcoming PhD project at MIT, which explores Elon Musk's Space X project on the borders of of South Texas and Tenochtitlan/Mexico City.

Palacios' visit was an incredible reminder of what deep interdisciplinarity can look like, and in their journals, many students said that they were awed by the journey that Palacios took. Many also said that they had not previously realized that art can be a method through which environmental knowledge is produced.

Students' final projects offered a chance to experiment with their own creativity. Each student composed or designed a creative work topically connected to a 3,000-3,500 word research paper. One student, for example, performed a filmed a traditional dance from Oaxaca ("My Ancestors Dance") to demonstrate their Zapotec ancestry and "to express my view and emotions tied to cultural and identity erasure." Another pair of students created a "halibut stamp," using traditional Japanese technique gyotaku. They first washed their hands to treat the fish with dignity. They put the 32-in halibut on ice, then using their hands, spread black watercolor acrylic evenly around the fish. Next, they laid the fish on white canvas and rocked it back and forth to generate the print. Their goal, they explained, was to illustrate the beauty and intricacy of aquatic life in the ocean—as well as how microplastics and pollution can enter the ocean's aquatic beings. "Through this process, we hoped to honor the Halibut’s form while also prompting reflection on the fragile balance between cultural tradition, natural beauty, and the growing threat of human impact on marine life."

Effectiveness: Montenegro found the most effective strategies for difficult conversations to emerge in the articulation of planning and unplanning. Via carefully planned activities, including several described above, students seemed to grow increasingly comfortable with one another in class. By week 4/5 they were assertively yet respectfully asking each other questions in small and large groups. They were meeting between classes to organize their co-facilitated sessions, and they were comfortable enough to approach Prof. Montenegro with suggestions for improving or expanding on course content.

However, it was also the unplanned spaces that were among the most generative of the class. In Week 9, for example, the students cofacilitating class that day left about 30 min of open-ended time for conversation. Montenegro was at first concerned that the students would get bored and leave. But with their appetites primed by the landgrab university presentation, students started discussing their visions for an environmental studies curriculum that takes decolonization seriously. They asked structural, institutional, and epistemic questions—not just of the professor but of one another. In the best tradition of dialogue, they showed how it is possible to have a normative position: to take a stand on genocide-ecocide, US imperialism, and Western conservation science's long history of marginalizing Indigenous knowledge. Yet, as opposed to "winning" a debate (a position of dominance and superiority), it's possible to examine how knowledge is produced, how power relationships mediate the production of knowledge, and, therefore, why "truth" is never merely objective—it always reflects multiple, situated, and partial knowledges (Harding 2009; Haraway 1988). Students did not yet have all the theoretical language for this complex epistemic engagement, but they were practicing a sophisticated form of pedagogy already, and that was exciting to witness.

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