ANTH 290B Environmental Justice Liebman Spring 2023

This course centers the ways in which environmental injustices have played fundamental roles in perpetuating anti-Black racism and anti-Indigenous forms of oppression in the United States. It goes on to explore how environmental injustices manifest across borders, on different spatial scales, and along a broader range of intersecting axes of difference including race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, species, and more. The course focuses as much on the social movements pushing for environmental justice and it does on injustices. Students will thus grapple with key questions about building coalitions across differences, theories of change, strategies and tactics, and what climate justice could be. A key consideration in this class is thus politics. Today’s scholarship on environmental (in)justice embraces taking political positions and actively seeks to create knowledge that can translate into political practice. With this consideration in mind, the class will focus much attention on different efforts to imagine and bring about more just environmental futures.