Organized by Imagining Climate Change and the Sustainable Online Network for Global Cultural Studies (SONGS).
November 23, 6:30-8:30 pm: Frances Roberts-Gregory, “Resist, Recover, and Reimagine: Black and Indigenous Women for Climate Justice in Gulf Coast Louisiana.”
Women and frontline communities of color currently lead grassroots movements for environmental, energy, and climate justice. They resist state-corporate crime, gender-based violence, and the mundanity of environmental racism. Feminist environmentalism(s) similarly promote intersectional climate solutions and critique extractive economies that externalize human rights abuses, racialized health disparities, and long-term pollution and increased greenhouse gas emissions at the hands of transnational corporations and the polluter elite. Fortunately, a growing multi-racial, gender-inclusive, and women-led movement for earth justice calls for a just transition to regenerative economies and energy democracy. Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color (BIWOC) water protectors and concerned citizens ultimately reimagine postapocalyptic geographies and conjure abolitionist possibilities while refusing the everyday violence of epistemic injustice. Most importantly, they embrace the transformative potential of a feminist spatial imagination and what an emerging generation of anti-racist, feminist scholars term anti-resilience, abolition ecology, emergent strategies, and radical planning. This lecture suggests how a feminist future centering Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurities might replace the necropolitics of toxic geographies and sacrifice zones. It also explores the possibility for interspecies survival, joy, mutual aid, pleasure, recovery, restoration, and healing by focusing on the activism, advocacy, and organizing work of Black and Indigenous women in Gulf Coast Louisiana.
Frances Roberts-Gregory is a vegan ecowomanist and future faculty fellow at Northeastern University. She is a co-founding member of the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal, former environmental educator for the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and resource developer for the New Orleans and C40 Women4Climate Mentorship Program. In 2021, she will start a new position as an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and co-director of the Spelman College Food Studies Program. Reach her via Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram @BlackngreenPhD.
Response by Rachel Grant, Assistant Professor in the College of Journalism.
Rachel Grant teaches courses in strategic communication, social media management and media law. Her research looks at media studies of race, gender and class and she has conducted extensive research with social movements, social justice, and Black feminism.
LINK TO G-CULTURAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE POETRY SLAM
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