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:

• Revealing Divisions to determine how environmental harms are unequally experienced by groups, often with systemic intent;

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

• (De)Colonising Land to address the connections between colonisation, redlining, borders, policing, and control over environmental spaces.

By the end of Unit 2, participants will be able to identify, evaluate, and share 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 question the power dynamics inherent in human-nature relations across time, space, and scales;

• Examining Portrayals to critique the ways in which racism and anthropocentrism are reflected in and reproduced by media representations of BIPOC communities and the environment; 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:

• Advocating Systems to formalise the role of community consultation and the environmental right to information in governance;

• Leveraging Grassroots to impact change through locally led forms of action focused on engaging and empowering the general public;

• Showcasing Movements to illustrate how collective action tactics have been utilised by environmental justice initiatives; and

• (Dis)Enfranchising People to confront the history and present reality of unfair systems for formal civic engagement in policymaking.

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:

• Producing Results to assess how distribution, recognition, and participation intersect to create extant outcomes;

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

• Sharing Insights to celebrate our Climates of Resistance community and showcase our learning from the semester for 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.