Course Contributors

Jamila Bargach

Dr. Jamila Bargach is the co-founder of Dar Si Hmad, which operates the world’s largest operational fog harvesting project. The system not only delivers potable water to Amazigh households, but also fosters the independence of women in the community. An anthropologist by training, Jamila has taught at University Mohammed V in Rabat and worked at a number of NGOs in Morocco and overseas. She has also published several articles on adoption practices, unwed mothers, gender and development, and the DSH fog initiative. As an activist and scholar, Jamila has dedicated her life to serving under-resourced communities, creating sustainable initiatives through education, and scientific innovation.

Jamila regularly joins Climates of Resistance to speak about capacity-building through community-driven engineering, the ethereality of fog, and Indigenous resource politics in Morocco. Her Spring 2021 conversation with Syracuse students is available here.

Annie Beach

Annie Beach is a visual artist, born and based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty One Territory. Beach is Cree/Saulteaux/Ukrainian, with relations from Peguis First Nation and Brokenhead First Nation.

Annie is a recent graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree (Honours) from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art, where she has sat on the School of Fine Art Student Association as Co-President for a number of years.

Beach is a serial muralist who has curated, designed, and executed over a dozen mural projects throughout the city. She works as art instructor with a variety of youth, community arts and cultural-based organisations.

Reflecting on the creation and purpose of public artwork, Annie says “Instead of just showing up and putting whatever you want onto a wall, you have to think about, ‘Who is going to see this, and who is it for?’ You have to connect with community members who are going to be in this area and give them a chance to play a part in what’s going to be put up on the wall; it gives them a sense of pride and self.” She brought that perspective to Train Stories, a multimedia series commissioned by Climates of Resistance to examine environmental injustices experienced by the Asian Diaspora and First Nations in Canada.

Heather Carson

Heather is currently a public servant for the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development in British Columbia, Canada. In her work as a First Nations Relations Advisor with the Provincial Government, Heather holds the Crown accountable for its legal duties to consult and accommodate; partners with local Nations to better understand stewardship values; and implements Government-to-Government Agreements between BC and First Nations.

Currently based in the small town of Fort St. James, Heather was born, raised, and works in the traditional territory of the Dakelh (Carrier) People. She holds a BA in International Studies from the University of Northern British Columbia and an LLM in International Law from the University of Edinburgh. Heather is passionate about incorporating Indigenous knowledge in resource management and empowering coworkers to develop cultural competency through equitable exchange with First Nations.

Heather’s recent projects include co-creating a Traditional Ecological Knowledge Course for Ministry staff; leading the implementation of Dakelh Culture workshops for local offices; running a COVID ‘Un-Book Club’ with multimedia-based discussions on various topics highlighting Indigenous heritage and politics; test-driving new legislation with Minister Katrine Conroy; and trapping lynx in -30°C with a local community member. She joins Climates of Resistance to speak about formal policy mechanisms for public participation in environmental governance.

Claire Celestin

Claire graduated with a degree in Behavioral Neuroscience from Northeastern University. A member of the Honors Program, Claire worked with Professors Judith Hall and Jin Goh at Northeastern’s Social Psychology Lab, extending research on the cognitive consequences of implicit racial bias to the realm of sexual orientation. Claire holds an MSc in Women and Children’s Health from King’s College London, and an MA in Social Anthropology from SOAS.

Claire serves as a Group Facilitator for the Community Audit of Climates of Resistance.

Gabby Cook Francis

Gabriella (Gabby) is a graduate student at Oxford University currently reading for an MPhil in Comparative Government. Prior to moving to the UK, Gabby worked for the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute and interned with the Clinton Foundation. She has also spent time with the International Rescue Committee, and Manhattan Borough President’s Office.

Gabby holds an Honors BA in Political Science and Philosophy from CUNY Hunter College. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and lived in New York City for 6½ years before moving to Oxford.

Gabby serves as a Group Facilitator for the Community Audit of Climates of Resistance.

Dina Eldawy

Dina graduated with a degree in International Relations and Citizenship and Civic Engagement from Syracuse University. During her time at Syracuse, Dina tutored refugee youth in the city and taught English to migrant communities in Santiago, Chile. Dina also worked with Palestinian refugee youth communities in Lebanon, where she learned more about social justice and transnational solidarity-building.

As a 2019 Marshall Scholar, Dina has completed an MA in Migration and Global Development at the University of Sussex and a MSc in Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford.

Dina serves as a Group Facilitator for the Community Audit of Climates of Resistance.

Dr Rebecca L Farnum, LLM

Becca is an activist-academic specialising in the interaction between environmental, economic, social, and political forces; the intersectionality between oppression and agency; and the interplay between localised movements and transnational discourses.

Past projects have involved drafting legal policy for the United Nations; community organising around fair housing, workplace discrimination, and environmental rights; and serving a stint in the Obama White House.

Becca’s teaching focuses on transformative learning, partnering with students to understand and purposefully impact global change in pursuit of sustainable justice.

Learn more about Becca’s work in this Syracuse Story about learning opportunities during the Spring 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and explore more in her Virtual Office.

Abiodun Henderson

Abiodun Henderson is a community organiser and founder of The Come Up Project. The Come Up Project’s flagship program is Gangstas to Growers, a holistic agribusiness training program for formerly incarcerated young adults. The Come Up Project is also developing the Sweet Sol Hot Sauce Cooperative.

Sweet Sol grows their ingredients with Black farmers, slanging their sauce on the way to liberation. Infused with turmeric and lavender, “you could just literally spoon it into your mouth” according to Chris Morocco. They partner with the South West Atlanta Growers Cooperative (SWAG Co-op), a farmer-based membership cooperative aiming to develop and maintain a healthy and secure food system that is environmentally and economically sustainable.

Abiodun has been a community organiser in the westside of Atlanta for over nine years. Under her leadership, the Westview Community Garden is now community-owned. Abiodun is a native Brooklynite who represents for the Kru Liberians. She enjoyed when her six-year-old son yelled, “Free Black People” every morning when they used to pass the Atlanta City Jail before COVID.

Abiodun has joined Climates of Resistance alongside Anamarie Shreeves to talk about the GtG model and examine trash as violence. The session investigates the connections between racism, liberation, waste systems, ethnic cleansing, motherhood, climate migrants, and personal and collective resistance.

Micah Hendler

Micah Hendler is a musical changemaker working to harness the power in each of our voices to make a difference. After studying international relations at Yale, Micah blended his academic knowledge of conflict and mediation with his artistry to found the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, an Israeli-Palestinian music and dialogue project. The chorus empowers young singers from East and West Jerusalem to share their truths, become leaders in their communities, and inspire others to join their work for peace, justice, inclusion, and equality.

Micah recently moved back to the US to work with the Justice Choir, a grassroots movement using the collective power of music to promote social and environmental justice, and Braver Angels, a relationship-building initiative depolarising the Red-Blue divide through dialogue. Named as a Forbes 30 Under 30, Micah also writes for Forbes about music, resistance, and global affairs.

As co-founder of Raise Your Voice Labs, Micah joins Climates of Resistance to lead a community music video project each semester, collaborating with students to explore the benefits of leveraging music as a tool for peacebuilding and environmental justice.

Alex Ho

Alex Ho is a British-Chinese composer based in London. Winner of the George Butterworth Award 2020, Alex has had pieces performed and commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Radio 3, Royal Opera House, National Opera Studio, Music Theatre Wales, and more. Alex studied Music at Oxford University and graduated with first-class honours in 2016 before completing a master’s in composition at Cambridge University in 2017 where he was awarded the Arthur Bliss Prize in Composition for his final portfolio. He is currently studying for a doctorate at the Royal College of Music funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Previously with Syracuse London, Alex composed “Back here, again, together” as part of The Remembrance Suite, commemorating the 30th Anniversary of Pan Am Flight 103 and the University’s special relationship with the community of Lockerbie.

As co-director of Tangram, an artist collective catalysing transnational imagination and celebrating the vitality of Chinese cultures, Alex shares his work on projects like “Untold” and “Dreaming Clouds” to highlight how we can give voice to nature through music.

Antonio López

Born and raised in East Palo Alto, California, Antonio López received his B.A. in Global Cultural Studies and African & African-American studies from Duke University before earning a Masters in Fine Arts (poetry) at Rutgers-Newark. His debut collection, Gentefication, won the 2019 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry, and is set to be published later this year.

As a 2018 Marshall Scholar, Antonio completed a Masters in Philosophy in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, where he served as poetry editor for the Oxford Review of Books. He is now pursuing a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University while fighting gentrification in his hometown as the newest and youngest councilmember for the City of East Palo Alto.

Building on his family’s experience and using East Palo Alto as a case study, Antonio contributes poetry and scholarship on issues of borders, migration, redlining, and gentrification to Climates of Resistance.

Christopher Morgan

Chris is a conservationist interested in parks and protected areas, land use planning, and geographic information systems (GIS). He currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on the traditional territory of the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee Nations, and works for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Born and raised in Madison, Chris graduated with degrees in geography and cartography/GIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked as a planner for the Minnesota Department of Transportation for three years, including an analysis on whether people of color were disproportionately affected by public airports throughout the state.

Chris recently completed his master’s degree at the University of Northern British Columbia in Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, where he partnered with the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation to identify lands of ecological and cultural importance in their territory for conservation action. Together, they built a planning tool that considers current biodiversity, climate change, and landscape connectivity, all while working to interweave the Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Tsay Keh Dene throughout the project.

Emma Morgan-Bennett

Emma is a visual media artist and activist-scholar particularly drawn to questions surrounding race, reproduction, and the body. Committed to Black Radical Joy, Emma sees liberation within the creative celebration and engagement of those who have survived and thrived in spite of the odds.

A born and bred New Yorker from Washington Heights, Emma is currently studying filmmaking at Goldsmiths, University of London as a Marshall Scholar. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2020 with High Honors having written her Medical Anthropology thesis on Radical Doulas and the Black Maternal Mortality Crisis in Austin, Texas.

Outside of the classroom, Emma spends her time working as a full-spectrum doula (physically and emotionally supporting pregnant people through their reproductive journeys), working on her creative projects, and writing.

Emma serves as a Group Facilitator for the Community Audit, has taught a special session on the use of humour and parody in anti-racism, and is a Teaching Artist for our community music video projects.

Breanna Riddick

A graduate of George Washington University, Breanna is currently based at the University of Hawai’i for her doctoral work in American Studies. Breanna’s work takes a transnational approach, imagining history as non-linear so as to consistently assess how the past both impacts and exists in the present.

Bre studied abroad with Syracuse University London for the 2019 spring semester. During her time in London, she gave a presentation on ‘voluntourism’ for the Questioning Borders Symposium at London’s Migration Museum. Her research was derived largely from her main focus in American Studies: the intersections of contemporary culture and Blackness.

Breanna serves as a Group Facilitator for the Community Audit of Climates of Resistance.

Emma Robbins

Emma Robbins is a Diné artist, activist, and community organiser with a passion for empowering Indigenous women. As Director of the Navajo Water Project, Emma creates infrastructure bringing clean running water to the 1-in-3 Navajo families without it.

Founder of The Chapter House, a new Indigenous arts space, Emma completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied Modern Latin American Art History in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through her artwork, Emma strives to raise awareness about the lack of clean water on Native Nations and educate viewers about issues such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis; representations and misrepresentations of Native Peoples; and broken treaties.

Emma joins Climates of Resistance to speak about structural inequalities in resource access; the extreme levels of uranium contamination faced by the Navajo Nation; and the value of art for cultural and environmental changemaking.

Anamarie Shreeves

Anamarie “Ree” Shreeves is a cooperative founder, program coordinator and geographer who works closely with environmentally-driven organizations to support and promote their mission.

Ree started her zero waste life in 2013, and since has grown an affinity for trash, dedicating her research to waste behaviour and its connection to climate change. Ree is a founding member of FortNegrita, a definitive source for zero waste, self-reliance, conscious consumerism and eco-tourism. Through Fort Negrita, Ree hosts bi-monthly reusable menstrual pads workshops, organises an annual Earth Day festival in Atlanta, teaches zero waste workshops around the US, and consults for local businesses on zero waste operations and accommodations. She has worked with many local organisations, including West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, Food Well Alliance, Seed Life Skills, Sevananda Co-op, Dunwoody Nature Center, Ladyfest Atlanta, MURMUR Gallery, and Red Bike & Green, to name a few, and has also developed the “Atl Zero Waste Guide”.

In 2020, Ree published her master’s thesis on “The significance of the informal waste sector in a minority world country: A Case-Study of Metropolitan Atlanta”. Today, she continues to make Fort Negrita an inclusive platform and cooperative in the environmental space.

Ree has joined Climates of Resistance alongside Abiodun Henderson to examine trash as violence. The session investigates the connections between racism, liberation, waste systems, ethnic cleansing, motherhood, climate migrants, and personal and collective resistance.

Garrett Turner

A native of Florence, Alabama, Garrett Turner is a proud member of Actors’ Equity. Garrett majored in music and creative writing at Emory, where he recently served as an Arts and Social Justice Fellow using theatre to honour known victims of the 1906 Atlanta race massacre.

Garrett has studied at the University of St. Andrews as a Bobby Jones Scholar and holds masters degrees from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Queen Mary. He is currently writing Eleanor: A Church Story, a musical about a young Black woman from Tennessee who stages a mini revolution in her church when she is banned from preaching because she’s a girl.

In 2019, Garrett worked alongside Syracuse drama students while premiering Thoughts of a Colored Man with Syracuse Stage. He continues that collaboration as a Teaching Artist for the “Climates of Resistance Raise Your Voice” community music video project, helping students consider how we can use music and art to advocate for sustainable justice.

Austin Willacy

For the past 23 years, Austin Willacy has directed Youth in Arts’ ‘Til Dawn, an award-winning teen a cappella group that empowers youth to find their voices in many ways. He is also a veteran member of The House Jacks, with whom he has produced 10 full-length albums and completed multiple world tours.

Austin has served on the boards of the Rainforest Action Network, a grassroots effort taking action against industries driving climate change, and Freight & Salvage, a nonprofit community arts organisation promoting public understanding of traditional music with a focus on racial and gender justice. As a facilitator for YES!, Austin has co-founded Arts for Social Change Jams in the US, Turkey, and India; the Black Diaspora Jam; and the Mens Jam.

Each semester, Climates of Resistance embarks on a special project with Austin and his team at Raise Your Voice Labs, using music to facilitate dialogue about environmental activism. Building on his political and community organising experience, Austin helps students consider what effective public participation can look like in the midst of mass inequities.

Naomi Woo

Naomi Woo is a conductor, composer, and pianist noted for her work as a socially-engaged artist and educator. As Assistant Conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Naomi programmes educational concerts with a focus on community engagement. She is also the first Music Director of Sistema Winnipeg, a music programme for social change in the city’s North End. A commitment to using music to imaginatively transform the world runs through all of Naomi’s work, including her doctoral thesis about The Practicality of the Impossible.

Naomi completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She has also studied mathematics, philosophy, and music at Yale College, the Yale School of Music, and Université de Montréal.

Naomi is a featured artist on several Climates of Resistance pieces, including the work of Tangram and Train Stories, a multimedia series examining environmental injustices experienced by the Asian Diaspora and First Nations in Canada.

Reylon Yount

As a biracial Chinese American growing up in San Francisco, Reylon began learning yangqin (the Chinese hammered dulcimer) as a way to stay connected to his heritage. They have since introduced the rare instrument to the world stage, featured alongside Rhiannon Giddens and Yo-Yo Ma on Silkroad’s GRAMMY Award-winning record “Sing Me Home”.

While completing undergraduate studies in Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard University, Reylon conducted research for environmental organisations in China, Australia, and the U.S. They then moved to the UK to complete two master’s degrees at SOAS University of London and Goldsmiths University of London. Reylon now co-directs Tangram, an artist collective envisioning a world beyond the China-West dichotomy.

Reylon serves as a Group Facilitator for the Community Audit, has taught a special session about environmental justice in East-West relations, and is a Teaching Artist for our community music video projects.