Environment & Sustainability
My interests in participating in this course lie within its potential to equip me with the theoretical and practical tools to reconcile the chronic disharmonies associated with striving towards education as a practice of joy, freedom and self-actualization within academic spaces that have historically been in service to colonization, white-supremacy, and the ruling class. Parallel to this, I am interested in the course’s capacity to support and facilitate the internal labor required of me as an educator to interrogate and radically transform my own internalized belief systems and behaviors that uphold oppressive hegemonies. Finally, this current moment of increasing global ecological and social destabilization requires accomplices within all sectors of influence to act in solidarity to orient their practices towards liberatory ends. Academia, with its historic wealth of access to power and material resources, is a site ripe for this sort of progressive subversion.
My most formative experience teaching social action was in my capacity as the Environmental and Climate Justice Coordinator with the Eugene-Springfield NAACP. One of my responsibilities in this role was leading Liberation of Communities and Land, an initiative to build social infrastructure for Oregon leaders equipped with the skills and knowledge to advance environmental, climate, and social justice in their communities. Since 2021, I have developed and taught curriculum for the project’s educational arm, the Rise As Leaders Cohort, which taught on the foundations of organizing for environmental and climate justice to youth from marginalized backgrounds. We covered topics such as best practices for building a campaign, stakeholder power mapping, and organizing across difference.
For the course’s final project, students have an opportunity to research and explore the environmental justice dimensions of a real-world topic of their choosing using a policy, scientific, or art-based approach. In the first iteration of the course in Spring 2024, I saw final projects across a spectrum of topics such as food justice, water pollution, single-use plastics, multimodal transportation, and accessibility in outdoor recreation programs. These projects were also not always localized. I believe my participation in this course would shift the final project from merely an information gathering, analysis, and recommendation generating venture to one that seeks to make a perceivable change within the scope of the campus or broader community.
How did you hear about opportunity
My University of Oregon colleague Erin Moore shared this offering with me. She was the one that originally reached out to me in the summer of 2023 to gauge my interest in teaching a course in Environmental Studies at UO. Early on in our conversations, I expressed a desire to integrate the environmental and social justice work I had been engaging in outside of academia into the design of the course. I believe her sharing this opportunity was her being attentive to and supportive of my aims as an educator oriented towards bridging theory and practice as well as uplifting multiple forms of knowledge production, particularly those found beyond the confines of higher education.
