Creating Community

Welcome to Climates of Resistance. We’re thrilled that you’re taking part in the Community Audit version of this course. To kick things off, let’s introduce the fantastic teaching team who will be helping to facilitate this anti-racist journey.

Hi everyone. My name is Claire, and I’ll be one of the TAs for the community version of this Climates of Resistance course. First and foremost, I just want to say how excited I am to get to work with so many of you and to build a community of trust, love, and anti-racism. I think that we will do some wonderful work together.

A little bit about me. I have a background in behavioural neuroscience. I have a Master’s in Women and Children’s Health from King’s College London, and I’m currently studying at SOAS University of London for my Master’s in Social Anthropology. My research interests include investigating why racial health disparities exist and how we can fix them, especially in the field of reproductive health. In terms of what I like to do for fun and where I am right now: I’m in London; we are in lockdown, so I’ve been doing a lot more reading and jewellery making. And yeah, that’s all there is to me. You might see my cat here in my community version…and there she is [as the cat jumps behind Emma on the chair].

My name is Gabby Cook Francis and I'm going to be one of the TAs for this course. I just wanted to say hello and introduce myself before we start on this journey and engage in what I hope will be a series of really enriching and constructive community dialogues. A little bit about me: I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, but I lived in New York for 6.5 years where I got my Bachelor’s in Political Science and Philosophy from CUNY Hunter College. Currently I live in England and I’m a graduate student at the University of Oxford studying for a degree in comparative government.

My research interests focus on US foreign policy in the Middle East. Really, I’m interested in getting to global questions of justice, accountability, fairness, human rights, and power. Once again, I just wanted to say hello and welcome to this course. I’m really excited for the work that we’re going to do together and the journey that we’re going to embark upon, focusing on environmental racism and anti-racist practices in a really safe and productive community space. Bye for now, and I’m excited to meet you all very, very soon.

Hello, my name is Dina and I’m going to be one of the TAs for this course. I’m so excited to join this community effort and even more excited about the transnational nature of this topic and of this virtual classroom. Transnationalism is a concept that is very dear to me, not just in my personal background, coming from a minority community and religion in the United States, but also in my studies as well. For example, as an undergrad at Syracuse, I worked and learned from refugee communities across the world and increasingly became aware of the role of the environment in forced migration.

I went on to study migration and development at the University of Sussex. I’m currently studying imperial history at the University of Oxford. In non-academic terms, and other than watching so much TV, I have been working on some new crafts this quarantine. I’m excited to share those with you as well. And most importantly, I’d like to stress that I’m also learning about this new subject. And I would very much look forward to all of us growing together.

My name is Emma Morgan-Bennett, and I am so excited for this learning opportunity. We’re going to be working together in community, and that is such a special gift. If you’re interested in anything that ranges from race, reproduction, public health, filmmaking, theatre, and how we can use cultural work to further the liberation and justice movements that we’re all plugged into right now, I’m your girl. I am doing my Master’s in Filmmaking at Goldsmiths University of London, and I graduated from Swarthmore College with my BA in Medical Anthropology and Black Studies. Right now, I’m working on a short documentary that looks at Black motherhood in the era of Black Lives Matter movement. And I am really fascinated in how digital technologies shape our access to information and how we can better incorporate them into freedom fights.

Hi there, my name is Breanna Riddick and I am one of the teaching assistants for Climates of Resistance. I’m super excited to be working with you guys for this next this semester and throughout this course. I have a degree in American Studies from George Washington and minors in Political Science in History. A lot of my focus has been on culture and thinking about the past, but I have done some work thinking about voluntourism. And before this course, that was kind of the extent of my interaction with sort of Environmental Studies, so I’m super excited to be learning alongside you and I’m excited to help you out along the way.

Hi everybody. My name is Reylon Yount. I’m an artist and musician based in an unusually sunny London, and I’m very excited to be one of the TAs for Climates of Resistance with Rebecca Farnum, who happens to be my flatmate. I have a BA in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard, and I have a Master’s of Music in Development from SOAS, and a Master’s of Music in Sonic Arts from Goldsmiths. I’m particularly interested in the cultural aspects of environmental justice and the role that artists play in building sustainable communities. Very excited to learn alongside you and have some really wonderful conversations.

And I’m Becca. I will be the instructor for the formal Syracuse University course, and I’m really excited to be working with Claire, Gabby, Dina, Emma, Breanna, and Reylon to include a truly global group of community participants in this journey.

For me, environmental justice is the place where my passions for sustainability, global equity, and anti-racism come together. I have a background in international law and environmental anthropology. My PhD from King’s College London explored how people in Morocco, Kuwait, and Lebanon are partnering with nature for peacebuilding in the midst of conflict.

I currently live in the UK. When I’m not working at Syracuse or watching geeky TV, you can generally find me biking, hiking, and baking.

Again, welcome to Climates of Resistance from the entire Teaching Team. We are so excited to learn with you.

This course is about environmental racism, taught through the lens of environmental justice. For starters, then: what do these two terms mean?

Racism is everywhere, in all of our systems. That includes environmental policies and planning.

In the United States, for example, landfills, factories, and toxic areas are likely to be located near predominantly Black, Indigenous, and communities of colour. At the same time, Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Colour are more likely than their white counterparts to live in a food desert – an area with limited access to nutritious and affordable food.

Racism impacts your environmental risk and your environmental access. Simply put, that’s environmental racism.

As a field of study, environmental justice works to understand those patterns. Theories of justice are concerned with both outcomes and processes - what does the world look like, and why? How did it get that way? Why does it stay that way? What could change it?

Because we don’t just want to study things that are unfair. Environmental justice is also a framework for action. It is a movement that addresses environmental racism. Environmental justice is about ensuring that human interaction with nature is equitable. Through environmental justice, communities claim power to change unjust outcomes and demand fairer processes.

When we work on environmental justice, we can think about three main issues:

1. Distribution. Who is benefitting from the environment? Who is carrying environmental costs? Those are usually different groups – the people emitting the most carbon and contributing most to climate change, for example, are the least vulnerable to its negative impacts like sea level rise, extreme weather, and pollution.

2. Recognition. Who are we thinking about when we make environmental policies? Corporate elites or those who are marginalised? Citizens of our own country, or all persons? Only those alive today, or also future generations? And what about non-human animals and nature itself?

3. Participation. Who gets to make decisions about nature and resource use? Who is excluded from decision-making and the corridors of power? How can we create not only outcomes but also processes that recognise the diversity of stakeholders and their contributions?

Racism is everywhere. But it doesn’t have to be. Environmental justice is about changing that reality.

In February 2021, Climates of Resistance is bringing together more than one hundred people from around the world to learn together about environmental racism and collective action.

This class is housed at Syracuse University in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program and the Department of Geography. As part of a commitment to making university knowledge more freely available, and given the course themes, I am thrilled to have a Community Audit version running in parallel. As a participant in the Community Audit, you are not formally affiliated with the Syracuse class, but we are going to make the most of sharing resources. I want to talk a bit about what this looks like.

Each of you have been assigned to a Discussion Group. You’ll meet with the same group of people every week at the same time. We have limited the groups to no more than sixteen people: we really want you to have the chance to get to know each other, build relationships, and create a place where you feel comfortable being vulnerable.

There isn’t going to be a huge amount of interaction with the other groups on a regular basis, but there are a few ways to connect with the larger community. One is through our “Ask Anything” board on the website, which is shared across the Syracuse students and everyone in the Community Audit. Use that space to ask other groups what they’re focusing on, highlight events or movies you would recommend, and get to know each other more.

We’re also going to be co-creating a music video. And yes, we want you to participate! You’ll hear more about this later on, but we’re going to have four professional musicians work with us in dialogue to compose original music reflecting our perspectives on environmental justice, and editing a video representing our class community. Yes, you can sing - but you can also hold up a protest sign, film yourself collecting rubbish in a local park, record the birdsong in your background, and all kinds of other things. Micah, Austin, Garrett, and Reylon will share more about that just after our mid-semester break, which takes place the first week of April. (That weekend is Easter, Passover, Qingming, and the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination, and we won’t meet in recognition of those events.)

We’re going to premiere our music video at the end of the semester during a Public Symposium. During that event, each of the Syracuse students will present one of their assignments - these will include visual statistics, poetry, and advocacy campaigns. You will also be invited to share creatively at this Showcase. That event will be Friday the 21st of May. It’s totally optional, but we’d love to have you. We’ll talk more about how to get involved closer to the time.

More immediately, let me review what participating in the Community Audit involves.

Each week before you meet with your Discussion Group, you will be asked to explore a variety of materials. All of them will be freely available on the course website. There will be a bit of reading, including some heavier academic articles every once in a while - but we’ll always include summaries and other kinds of media that help explain the concepts. A huge amount of knowledge and heritage is captured in poetry, songs, dance, and art. And those can teach us every bit as much as the formal scholarly publications. So hopefully every week there’s at least one piece that really fits you and how you learn best.

In addition to the online materials, there are some fantastic environmental justice practitioners who are going to be talking in the Syracuse course. Unfortunately, we can’t ask them to join every one of the Community meetings, but we will record their sessions, so you’ll be able to watch and talk about them with your discussion groups.

As you’re working through your preparation materials each week, if there are things you aren’t sure about or don’t quite understand, don’t worry! That’s exactly what your Discussion Group is for. You can make a note of what you loved, what you didn’t agree with, and what you’re confused about in your Learning Log. The Learning Log is the form on each week’s page that you fill out in response to what you’re reading and watching. When you submit that form, you’ll get an email with a copy of the answers, and you can always go back to add and change notes.

The Teaching Team will see your responses. We’ll use them to help us prepare for class, identifying themes that lots of people had questions about or really want to discuss. But your Learning Log isn’t being graded, and no one is going to judge you for what you write down. It’s for you, as a place to document your learning in this course.

Everything you need should be on the course website. If you have questions at any time, and if there’s anything we can do to better empower you in this course, please email climatesofresistance@gmail.com.

As we begin exploring complex issues that can be challenging, I would like to take a few minutes to reflect on what anti-racist learning can look like, and highlight some tools on the course website to aid this process.

This class is designed to help us critically reflect on deeply personal, political subjects. Tackling topics of racism, bias, and inequality isn’t always very fun - especially when we start to realise the ways we benefit from injustice and inadvertently support oppression. You’re probably going to have a few uncomfortable moments. That’s okay. We’re here to learn together and support each other as we figure things out.

One of the first things we’ll do as a class is create guidelines for our conversations. We’ll talk openly and decide together how we want to address concerns about biased language, disagreements between us, and other issues that arise.

A few starting ideas that are important to remember:

We’re all learning. None of us are experts. We come to this class knowing a lot based on our own experience, but missing a lot as well. We’ll learn best if we respectful share our own perspectives while valuing others, and always acknowledging the reality of systemic injustice.

We’re all oppressed. Each one of us has some part of our identity that is disadvantaged in this world. But we’re all also oppressor. We all have aspects that benefit us, relative to others. We need to recognise that duality, and actively empower ourselves to use our privilege without abusing it.

We’re all imperfect. We’re going to mess up. That includes me. We are so surrounded by these issues that we all hold prejudices, even if they’re unintentional and unconscious. We need to work to confront and unlearn them - and we want this class to be a place where we hold each other accountable, without attacking people for mistakes.

We’re all practicing. Anti-racism is a lifelong process of learning and growing, no matter who we are. We’re not going to suddenly arrive at a magical destination at the end of this class, and have sorted ourselves out. But together, we can get in the habit of practicing often, and hopefully, getting really good.

The “Course Policies” page on our class website has more details about anti-racist learning, and resources to help us identify and rectify our own language, which can accidentally enforce everyday ableism and bias.

If at any time in this course you experience or witness bias, are concerned with any language being used, or are trying to figure something out, the website also has a Feedback Form and Concern Card. This can be entirely anonymous. Please use it anytime you aren’t sure, or would like to bring attention to a problem. There is also an Anonymous Ask & Answer Board on the website. Use that page to ask clarifying questions about terms and get clarity on anything you have always wondered about but been a bit hesitant to ask. The Teaching Team will regularly reply, and we’ll sign our names - but you can also answer each others’ questions, anonymously if you like, to share wider perspectives.

I hold open office hours. Times are posted in my Virtual Office, where you can also explore other resources and get to know me a little better. My office hours are open to everyone - you don’t have to be formally enrolled in my Syracuse class to come. And my office hours are for anything you want to talk through; it doesn’t have to be obviously connected to this class. If my usual times don’t work for you, please just email, and we’ll find a time.

Lastly: I know there are things I could be doing better. Please always feel free to tell me, and thank you for your patience and your guidance as I keep exploring anti-racism and how to be a better ally. I feel really honoured to be learning from you, and I’m grateful for your commitment to this course.