Climate & Environmental Justice in the U.S. South

Describing, Imagining, and Co-Designing Climate Just Futures in the U.S. South

Growing up in Birmingham, AL and finishing my PhD in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, most of my life has been lived in the U.S. South. Stories of climate and environmental justice work across the region abound and intersect with the complicated industrial, environmental, labor, and cultural histories that shape Southern lives and landscapesThis current body of work in development aims to describe, imagine, and co-design climate justice futures in and from the U.S. South using community-based research approaches and creative methods including storytelling, memoir, interviews, oral histories, poetic inquiry. One ambition of this project is to support in documenting and archiving these stories, drawing lessons from them, and building models of CJ futures in the region that honor and draw on this intergenerational work.

This work is primarily taking place in Birmingham, Alabama (in collaboration with the Institute for Human Rights at the University of Alabama at Birmingham) and North Carolina (in partnership with the North Carolina Climate Justice Collective). In North Carolina, I am currently working on a book manuscript documenting the work of the North Carolina Climate Justice Collective to weave a climate justice ecosystem over the last decade. In Birmingham, our team has recently been awarded a Level 1 Seed Grant from the Penn State Social Science Research Institute for our pilot research entitled “Characterizing Community-Based Environmental and Climate Resilience Efforts in the Deep South through Visual Participatory Methods and Narrative Interviews: A Pilot Study in Birmingham, Alabama." One poetic piece emerging from this research is forthcoming in GeoHumanities to be followed shortly by another recently accepted piece.