This FEELed Note was written by Robin Metcalfe and Julia Jung.
On October 8 and 17, we hosted the first grad student community gatherings, as part of the “Supporting Syilx-led partnership initiatives and Climate Justice Graduate Student Community” project. We wanted to think together about what a Climate Justice Graduate Student Community can look like.
What’s going on?
We began by thinking about what is already ongoing, and what we want to see more of. Everyone shared about campus community climate and sustainability initiatives, for example, identifying specific events, partnerships, research streams, courses, co-curricular opportunities, and local community initiatives we had experience with.
It was helpful to hear about the Climate Conversations and Solutions Scholars Initiatives supported by the Climate Solutions Research Collective. Our Climate Justice Graduate Student Community efforts have large aspirational overlap with the Climate Solutions Scholars, which lends to coalition building. We learned about the Action for Climate Team (ACT) that is supported by UBCO Community Service Learning and the Sustainability Office, connecting undergraduate students on projects that advance human and environmental wellbeing. We gleaned insights about the Bachelor of Sustainability program and the involvement of program learners on a variety of initiatives, including through the Sustainability Course Union.
What can this mean for making graduate student community?
We thought together about what this landscape of initiatives means to us, how we relate with it, and how—as a community—we can be active in a way that moves with the momentum of what is already underway to extend the possibilities. We shared about hopes, dreams, and needs in our efforts.
Over the two gatherings there was a theme of deepening the justice orientation, looking at the framing around climate action and making the justice issues more explicit. We talked about how making more obvious links among justice issues can encourage coalitional thinking and deeper reflection. A number of people suggested connections between climate justice and specific justice topics that are areas of grad student focus, such as migrant justice, food justice, and disability justice.
Many of us hoped to find connection for meaningful action through a strengthened community of graduate students. A shared concern that many of us had was how to engage with this type of work in a way that tends to and strengthens our networks of care. An emphasis emerged around building sustainable relationships with and to care.
This focus on care extended to approaches in land care and environmental restoration. Concepts including queer ecologies 1 and care ecologies surfaced, along with insights from Crip scholars such as Eli Clare, who have questioned the politics of cure with which we so often approach ‘sustainability’ initiatives. A centering of ‘care, not cure’ resonated with a few of us as a way of emphasizing an ongoing reciprocally caring relationship with lands, waters, and more-than-human beings, rather than some concept of a previous ‘pure,’ unaltered state. This care-focused lens also influenced the way some of us are thinking about justice: we see climate justice and disability justice 2 (and other justice movements) as mutually constitutive and informing.
Many of us are already active in a number of other initiatives, so we want to proactively set up strategies that might support us in avoiding the common case of overwhelm and burnout. Such strategies might include partnering on initiatives and taking intentional time for creative and energizing activities that can help us hold and process all these heavy emotions.
What’s next?
Concretely, these are some possible initiatives and activities we discussed:
- Collaborations and partnerships: syilx-led land care and restoration efforts; Grad community members could mentor ACT undergrad students who lead activities for Climate Action Month
- Collaborative climate justice teach-ins and presentations
- Peer-to-peer learning: Co-hosting events with peers, not just “experts”, potentially highlighting justice-focused work by international students
- Creative and arts-based approaches such as zine-making, storytelling, or an Exquisite Corpse project speed version for collective climate justice reflection
- Newsletter with events, profiles of people and projects
- Regular community gatherings: Standing activity-based meetings for connection, to hear what people are doing that foster cross-disciplinary connections with an intentional focus on the nexus of climate justice with other justice issues
As we move forward, we would love to hear more from UBCO graduate students. What climate justice projects are you excited about, and what would you like to see more of? What tools or formats can we create together to strengthen the community?
- See e.g., Catriona Sandilands’ entry for Queer Ecologies in Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, et al., New York University Press, 2016.
- See e.g., Sins Invalid. (2019). Skin, tooth, and bone: The basis of movement is our people (2nd ed.). https://www.sinsinvalid.org/disability-justice-primer and Sins Invalid. (2020, June 16). What is disability justice? https://www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2020/6/16/what-is-disability-justice
This project is supported by the Principal’s Research Chair in Communities, Justice and Sustainability, The Centre for Climate Justice and the FEELed Lab.
The FEELed lab 