RACE, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL

Climate change and environmental catastrophes are on the rise, and it has been well- documented by now that those facing the heaviest impacts have largely been communities of color and / or working class. Many of these communities are also survivors of colonialism’s deeper ongoing legacies of dispossession as well as of capitalist extraction projects; yet these same communities have long had much to teach on how to be in better relations with our planet and each other. The purpose of this seminar is to train students in how to ask critical questions when it comes to the production of knowledge or when doing science.

“Community-based research” and “co-production” are increasingly popular frameworks and methods that often struggle to address the power differentials between researchers in powerful institutions and the dispossessed communities in which they work. As such, we will interrogate these concepts while simultaneously learning from several examples of decolonial research methods.

We begin by examining the colonial foundations of the sciences, with a special focus on the geo- and climate sciences. The ideological underpinnings of these sciences assume the earth to be an inert object ripe for exploitation; this legacy of European modernity is often at odds with the worldviews of indigenous peoples and their relations with nature. We then explore several anti-colonial and critical science scholars’ works and ask: what would it mean to revisit the foundations of our disciplines with a decolonial lens? How do we know (study) and relate to a place in a non-extractive and mutually respectful way that centers local communities and indigenous knowledge and practices? We will explore this through several examples, including an in-depth dive into this seminar’s ongoing collaborative community project with The Black School, a New Orleans based community organization facing lead contamination on their land within the context of a long legacy of environmental racism.

Students taking the seminar for 3 credits and who aim to decolonize their own research will be trained in ethnographic methods by developing an anthropological lens - first through a self-ethnography workshop that focuses on the positionality and then through their own mini-ethnography projects.