45th Annual Scholar and Feminist Conference: Climate Crisis, Climate Justice
Featuring a screening of the film The Hottest August, followed by a Q&A with director and producer Brett Story, and Roslyn Silver ‘27 Science Keynote Lecture by Robin E. Bell, Palisades Geophysical Institute/Lamont Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.
About the Conference
The global climate crisis has transformed the landscape of climate justice theory and practice by posing the greatest threats to human survival and the greatest possibilities for radically reorganizing every aspect of society.
The crisis brings us to a series of reckonings. How does climate change intersect with poverty, housing, and gentrification? With the military industrial complex and varying forms of imperialism? How can we conceive of climate justice rooted in a politics of gender, racial, economic, and disability justice, and how do we move toward this conception? How can we bridge the divides between scientific research and social justice activism? What is a feminist methodology or praxis in the climate justice movement? Why do we need feminist politics now more than ever to address the climate crisis?
This year’s Scholar and Feminist Conference will engage with these questions through site-specific analyses of climate crisis and climate justice in New York City, the Pacific, and the Caribbean and Gulf Coast. The conference will feature scholars from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities alongside activists who will offer interdisciplinary approaches to the climate crisis and engage in discussions together and with the audience about where to go from here.
In addition to traditional keynotes and panels, the conference will feature workshops and breakout sessions centered on particular organizing initiatives where participants can share networks and strategize. A featured highlight will be our annual Roslyn Silver ‘27 Science Lecture, delivered by Robin E. Bell, a polar scientist and professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
This event is free, open to the public, and mobility accessible. RSVP is preferred, not required. Seating is available on a first-come, first-seated basis.
Schedule
FRIDAY 2/7
5 – 6 PM: Registration and Opening Reception
6 – 8:30 PM: The Hottest August, a film by Brett Story
Film screening and Q&A with director Brett Story and Meg McLagan, Visiting Professor of Professional Practice, Barnard College.
A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, The Hottest August gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is one city over one month: New York City, including its outer boroughs, during August 2017. It’s a month heavy with the tension of a new president, growing anxiety over everything from rising rents to marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of either wildfires or hurricanes on every coast. The film pivots on the question of futurity: What does the future look like from where we are standing? And what if we are not all standing in the same place? The Hottest August offers a mirror onto a society on the verge of catastrophe, registering the anxieties, distractions, and survival strategies that preoccupy ordinary lives.
SATURDAY 2/8
9 – 9:45 AM: Registration and Breakfast
9:45 – 10 AM: Introduction by Elizabeth Castelli, BCRW Director
10 – 11 AM: Discovery to Action: Change from the Poles to Our Shores
Keynote Roslyn Silver ‘27 Science Lecture by Robin E. Bell
The brilliant blue water atop the ice sheets is emblematic of rapid change at the ends of our earth. This change at the poles is now appearing at coastal communities around the globe. The changing ice sheets remain a frontier full of rich discovery; rivers, waterfalls and water that runs uphill. As these discoveries feed our ice sheet models they also motivate my individual actions to address how we can keep our planet both habitable and beautiful.
Robin E. Bell is Palisades Geophysical Institute/Lamont Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.
11 – 11:15 AM: Break
11:15 AM – 12:30 PM: “And I trust what I can see and what I can hear and what I can do on my block”
Organizing for Climate Justice in New York City
Featuring
Xiye Bastida, Organizer, Fridays for Future NYC and Member, People’s Climate Movement-NY
Ashley Dawson, Professor of English, The Graduate Center, CUNY and the College of Staten Island
Fernando Ortiz-Baez, Climate Preparedness and Resiliency Organizer, The Point
Alicia Grullón , Artist in Residence at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York University
Moderated by Julie Sze, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of California, Davis
Title quote from June Jordan, “Getting Down on My Street,” Affirmative Acts: Political Essays. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1998.
12:30 – 12:50 PM: Lunch pick up
Please pick up lunch in the designated lower level classroom(s) or in common area on the fifth floor. Lunch may be brought into classrooms during workshops.
12:50 – 2:20 PM: Workshops
Organizing for Climate Justice on College Campuses
anaïs peterson and Dev Punaini, DivestEd
Room 502, The Diana Center
Undoing Militarized Solutions to Climate Catastrophe
Facilitated by Timmy Rose and Paola Del Toro, Dissenters
Room LL103, The Diana Center
Dissenters is a new national movement organization that is leading our generation to reclaim our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving institutions, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world. From the poor black and brown families that were disproportionately devastated by Hurricane Katrina, to the incarcerated men and women who were kept in prison during Hurricanes across the Carolinas in 2018, it is poor black and brown people who are and will be most impacted by climate change. In response to forced displacement, migration, and threats to systems of food security in the wake of ecological disaster, states have offered militarized solutions. On top of that, it’s become well known that the Department of Defense is the world’s largest polluter. Militarism is a leading contributor to climate change, while increased militarism is also proposed as the solution. Any solution to climate change will require divesting from war and militarism as a crucial step in radically repairing our relationship to the earth.
Climate Preparedness and Mitigation in Public Housing: NYCHA Red Hook Houses Case Study
Karen Blondel, Fifth Avenue Committee
Room LL104, The Diana Center
In this workshop attendees will tackle the intersections of climate justice and housing justice. Most public housing developments in New York City are located in areas with the greatest geographic vulnerability to climate change, sea level rise and surge, and other climate related issues. Examining as a case study the experience of NYCHA Red Hook Houses residents after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, this workshop will consider the effects of climate crisis on economically and geographically vulnerable communities, how communities have adapted to infrastructure challenges, and how we might prepare for the present and future crises.
Abolitionist Climate Justice: No New Jails NYC
Faciliated by Mon Mohapatra and Kei Francis Williams, No New Jails
Room 504, The Diana Center
No New Jails NYC is a multiracial, intergenerational network of residents, community members, and activists fighting against Mayor Bill de Blasio’s jail expansion plan. We are calling for the immediate closure of Rikers without building new jails in any borough in NYC. Ultimately, we are organizing towards a jail- and detention-free NYC.
2:20 – 2:30 PM: Break
Coffee and tea will be provided in the lower level lobby.
2:30 – 3:45 PM: “hunger prays to rage for/ resilience”
Colonialism and Natural Disaster in the Caribbean & Gulf Coast
Featuring
Adriana Garriga-Lopez, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Kalamazoo College
Jane Gilbert, Chief Resiliency Officer, City of Miami
Lynnell Thomas, Associate Professor of American Studies, UMass Boston
Juslene Tyresias, Mouvman Peyizan Papay/Papaye Peasant Movement
Moderated by Alexa Dietrich, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Wagner College and Program Director, Social Science Research Council
Title quote from Lenelle Moïse, “where our protest sound,” Haiti Glass. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014.
3:45 – 4 PM: Break
4 – 5:15 PM: “in the largest ocean on earth/ spellbound, windswept, lashed”
Indigeneity, Conservation, and Imperialism in the Pacific
Featuring
Hōkūlani K. Aikau, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies, University of Utah
Marama Muru-Lanning, Senior Research Fellow, James Henare Research Centre, University of Auckland
Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College
Moderated by Kevin Fellezs, Associate Professor of Music and African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University
Title quote from Dinah Hawken, “The uprising,” Griffith Review, Edition 43, eds. Julianne Schultz and Lloyd Jones, 2013.
5:15 – 5:30 PM: Break
5:30 PM – 6:30 PM: “When this house caught on fire, everybody was home”
Closing Plenary
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Founder and CEO, Ocean Collectiv
Thanu Yakupitiyage, Associate Director, US Communications, 350.org
Title quote from June Jordan, Civil Wars. Boston: Beacon, 1981.
6:30 PM: Reception
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Hōkūlani K. Aikau is a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi associate professor in the Division of Gender Studies and the Division of Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. Dr. Aikau is the author of A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawaiʻi (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and with Vernadette Gonzalez, she has coedited Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi (Duke University Press 2019). Her next ethnographic project, Hoaʻāina: Resturning People and Practices to Heʻeia, funded in part by UH Sea Grant, is a collaboration with Kākoʻo ʻŌiwi, a Native Hawaiian non-profit working to restore wetland taro farming on the windward coast of Oʻahu.
Xiye Bastida is a teenage climate activist based in New York City and one of the lead organizers of the Fridays For Future youth climate strike movement. Bastida was born and raised in Mexico as part of the Otomi-Toltec indigenous peoples. She sits on the administration committee of the People’s Climate Movement, where she brings the voice of youth to existing grassroots and climate organizations. Bastida launched a youth activism training program to expand the climate justice movement and is a member of Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion. In 2018, she was invited to the 9th United Nations World Urban Forum to speak about indigenous cosmology. She received the “Spirit of the UN” award in 2018.
Robin E. Bell is Palisades Geophysical Institute/Lamont Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, directing research programs on ice sheets, tectonics, rivers and mid-ocean ridges in Antarctica and Greenland. She has also developed technology to monitor our changing planet. Bell has coordinated ten major aero-geophysical expeditions to Antarctica and Greenland, studying what makes ice sheets collapse. She has discovered a volcano beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet, several large lakes locked beneath two miles of ice and demonstrated that ice sheets can thicken from below. Bell lead a Lamont team to map the Hudson River from Staten Island to Albany. In 2006 Bell received an honorary degree from Middlebury College and had an Antarctic Mountain named for her. During the International Polar Year, Bell lead a major expedition to Antarctica to explore the last unknown mountain range on Earth, the Gamburtsev Mountains, which were completely covered with ice. Here, the Team discovered that water hidden beneath the ice sheet runs uphill. Using the new IcePod and gravity technologies, Bell’s team is presently exploring the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating piece of ice the size of France that covers the least known piece of ocean floor on our planet. Robin Bell is President of the American Geophysical Union, the largest organization of Earth and Space scientists on our planet.
Karen Blondel is a longtime resident of Public Housing in Red Hook Brooklyn. Karen became involved with campaigns against waste transfer stations in the 1990s and environmental issues after Super Storm Sandy hit the Red Hook Houses in 2012. Karen is a graduate of N.E.W.: Non-Traditional Employment for Women and the Joint Urban Manpower Program where she became a Computer Aided Drafter and Designer and Engineer Assistant on infrastructure projects including the rehabilitation of the RFK Bridge in NYC and MTA’s flood mitigation and resiliency upgrades in response to Hurricane Sandy. Karen Blondel is currently working at the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn as the Turning the Tide Environmental Justice Organizer and Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice Organizer.
Ashley Dawson, a Professor of English at the Graduate Center/CUNY and the College of Staten Island. He is a scholar of postcolonial studies and a climate justice activist. He is the author of two recent books on topics relating to environmental issues, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016), as well as many other books on topics relating to migration, global justice, and cultural struggles. His book on energy democracy and just transition, The Energy Commons, is forthcoming.
Paola Del Toro is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at the University of Chicago and member of Dissenters. She is majoring in English and Sociology and her interests include critical theory, surveillance studies, immigration, and literary criticism. She is working on a project analyzing labor and capital through the work of Sandra Cisneros.
Alexa S. Dietrich is program director at the Social Science Research Council, with a portfolio including the Scholarly Borderlands Initiative, the Program on Religion and the Public Sphere, and the Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean. Her book, The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico (NYU Press, 2013), was awarded the Julian Steward Award for the best book in environmental anthropology in 2015. Her current projects focus on comparative environmental health vulnerabilities, preparedness, decision-making, and resilience in New York City, Portland, OR, and Puerto Rico. She is on the Board of Directors of La Colmena, Staten Island’s community jobs and immigration resource center, and maintains an appointment as associate professor of anthropology at Wagner College.
Kevin Fellezs (Kanaka Maoli) is an Associate Professor of Music and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. His book, Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press), a study of fusion (jazz-rock-funk) music of the 1970s, won the 2012 Woody Guthrie Book Award. His newly-published book, Listen But Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Across the TransPacific (Duke University Press), is a study of the ways in which Native Hawaiian values are articulated by Kanaka Maoli and non-Hawaiian guitarists in Hawai‘i, California, and Japan.
Dr. Adriana María Garriga-López is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her work has appeared in Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures; e-flux; Ethnographies of US Empire (Duke, 2018); Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America (Arizona University Press, 2017); Contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2019); and New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Her work is forthcoming in Anthologies of Contemporary Dance in Puerto Rico. Garriga-López is also a poet, performance artist, muralist, and soprano. Her creative work has appeared in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine; The New Engagement; Cruce; 80 Grados; Sargasso; Ad Hoc; African Writing; The Columbia Review; Beyond Polarities; and Piso 13.
Jane Gilbert is the Chief Resilience Officer for City of Miami where she leads strategy development and implementation primarily related to the City’s response to climate change. Prior to joining the City, Ms. Gilbert managed The Miami Foundation’s agenda on sea level rise, led Wells Fargo’s philanthropy and community affairs in South Florida and served as the Executive Director for 3 nonprofits, including Dream in Green. Ms. Gilbert holds a BA in Environmental Science from Barnard College and MPA from the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Alicia Grullón’s legislative art project PERCENT FOR GREEN looks at climate change from the perspective of environmental injustices in the Bronx and has created a functioning green bill with Bronx residents. She is co-organizer and co-author of the People’s Cultural Plan, a coalition of artists, cultural workers, and activists responding to New York City’s first ever cultural plan in 2017. Grullón’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions including The 8th Floor, Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC House for Arts and Media, School of Visual Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University, Socrates Sculpture Park, Performa 11, and Art in Odd Places. She has received grants from the Puffin Foundation, Bronx Council on the Arts, the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York, and Franklin Furnace Archives. She has participated in residencies in the United States and Korea among them The Bronx Museum’s AIM program. She has presented for the 2017 Whitney Biennial with Occupy Museums, Creative Time Summit 2015, The Royal College of Art, and United States Association for Art Educators. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Creative Time Reports, ArtNet News, The Columbia Spectator, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Grullón is the recipient of the inaugural Colene Brown Art Prize for 2019. Grullón is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts and City University of New York (CUNY).
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, and Brooklyn native. She is founder of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for coastal cities, and founder and CEO of Ocean Collectiv, a consulting firm for conservation solutions. Previously, as executive director of the Waitt Institute, Dr. Johnson co-founded the Blue Halo Initiative and led the Caribbean’s first successful island-wide ocean zoning effort. She also developed ocean policy at the EPA and NOAA, and was a leader of the March for Science. Johnson serves on the board of directors for the Billion Oyster Project, GreenWave, World Surf League’s PURE, on the advisory boards of Environmental Voter Project, Oceanic, and Scientific American, and as a fellow at The Explorers Club. Find her @ayanaeliza.
Meg McLagan is New York-based filmmaker and anthropologist. She directed the feature documentary Lioness (2008), which won the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, was broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and optioned for serialization by Sony Television Pictures. Recent work includes video installation Half Truths and Full Lies (2018) and multimedia project Air Drifts (2016), produced in collaboration with NASA and exhibited at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. She began her film career as a producer on Paris is Burning, one of the most acclaimed examples of 1990s New Queer Cinema. McLagan’s scholarly work focuses on the relation between forms of politics and visual culture. She has published essays on human rights, testimony, and architectures of activism and is co-editor of Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (Zone Books: 2012). She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Sundance Institute, MacDowell Colony, National Endowment for the Humanities, Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, Mellon Foundation, School of American Research, and the Wenner Gren Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Fledgling Fund, Rockefeller Family & Associates, New York State Council on the Arts, and Impact Partners. McLagan is Visiting Professor of Professional Practice in Film Studies at Barnard and affiliate faculty, Modern Tibetan Studies, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
Mon Mohapatra is an Indian abolitionist designer based in New York City, currently working in the non-profit industrial complex. She is an organizer with No New Jails and Equality Labs, and her writing focuses on surveillance and design.
Marama Muru-Lanning is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the James Henare Māori Research Centre at the University of Auckland and author of Tūpuna Awa: People and Politics of the Waikato River (Auckland University Press, 2016). Her research is concerned with debates and critical challenges in social anthropology where she focuses on the heterogeneity of Māori and their unique sense of place and belonging in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Marama’s research incorporates mātauranga (Māori knowledge) and tikanga (Māori methods). Marama’s research publications reflect her fascination with freshwater and coastal water property rights as well as her interest in Māori and indigenous knowledge production. She co-leads a number of interdisciplinary research projects in environment, robotics, infrastructure, and health. Marama is from Tūrangawaewae Marae and is of Waikato Tainui and Ngāti Maniapoto descent.
Fernando Ortiz-Baez (M.S, M.Des, LEED Green Associate, WEDG) is the Climate Preparedness and Resiliency Organizer at THE POINT CDC where his work focuses on climate justice, resiliency and environmental justice efforts. He is a Sustainable Designer at his small firm TheGreenestFern where he has worked on design and research projects focused on urban sustainability and resiliency, particularly in the South Bronx.
anaïs peterson (they//name) is a student at the university of pittsburgh studying poetry and urban studies and where they serve as the executive vice president of the undergraduate student government. they entered the climate movement through the anti-fracking movement in southwest PA and are now in their fourth year of organizing with the fossil fuel divestment movement at the university of pittsburgh. they believe no community or area should be a sacrifice zone to extraction and our work must include both the end of harmful systems and building the new through a just transition. they are working towards the abolition of all systems of extraction and a world of liberation beyond our wildest dreams.
Dev Punaini (he/him) is a second-year geography student at Dartmouth College. He studies climate change through the lenses of political ecology and critical development geography. On campus, he organizes with migrant justice and climate justice groups, trying to help with and extend existing multigenerational local movements. An international student from India, he bases his theory and praxis of climate activism upon transnational solidarities that challenge systems of extraction on a global scale.
Timmy Rose is a member of Dissenters and People’s Response Team. He is currently a law student at Chicago Kent College of Law, working to further bridge grassroots movements with transformative legal advocacy.
Dean Itsuji Saranillio is from Kahului, Maui and currently lives in New York City where he is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His work looks at the possibilities that might emerge when non-Native peoples work in place-based affinity with Native movements. His book titled Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (Duke University Press, 2008) shows that U.S. statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism.
Brett Story is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker based in Toronto whose films have screened at festivals internationally, including the Viennale, True/False, Oberhausen, It’s All True, and Dok Leipzig. Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. The film was broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens in April of 2017. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Infrastructures of Citizenship. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.
Julie Sze is a Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment. Sze’s research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and urban/community health and activism.
Professor Sze has published over 45 journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, primarily in the fields of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, geography, and public policy. She works in collaboration with environmental scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists and community based organizers on a wide range of research projects in California, New York, and China. Professor Sze has received a number of grants for her individual research, from the UC Humanities Institute, the American Studies Association, the AAUW, and the Ford Foundation.
Lynnell Thomas is Associate Professor of American Studies at UMass Boston and author of Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory (Duke, 2014). Her research interests include New Orleans tourism, African American history and culture, and Black popular culture. A native of New Orleans, Lynnell Thomas is part of the post-Katrina diaspora, which informs her teaching and scholarship. Her research is also concerned with the diverse backgrounds and experiences that constitute and contest American identity and values. Her most recent scholarship has examined the distortion of African American history and culture in New Orleans’ tourism narrative, the negative impact of this narrative on policy decisions following Hurricane Katrina, and the ways that African Americans and others have attempted to resist and revise this narrative.
Juslene Tyresias is the program director and member of the executive committee of Mouvman Peyizan Papay/Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP) in Haiti. Prior to this post, Tyresias served as a trainer within MPP for over a decade. She also serves as MPP’s representative to various cross-sector movement coalitions and collaborations within and outside of Haiti. Founded in the early 70s, MPP is one of the most prominent peasant movements in Haiti, and a founding member of La Via Campesina.
Paige West is Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. Her broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. Since the mid-1990s she has worked with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of three books and the editor of five more. West has written about environmental conservation and international development, the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature, and the creation of commodities and practices of consumption. She is currently writing about climate change. West is the founder of the journal Environment and Society, the chair of the Ecology and Culture University Seminar at Columbia University, a fellow (and past chair) of the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, and past president of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. In addition to her academic work, West is the co-founder board member of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. West is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.
Kei Francis Williams (he/they) is a Black queer trans masculine decentralized network trainer, artist, and historian. He is a paid organizer with Peoples Climate Movement NYC and Marsha P. Johnson Institute, and a voluntary member of the abolitionist network No New Jails.
Thanu Yakupitiyage is the U.S. Communications Director at 350.org, an organization tackling the climate crisis by ending the age of fossil fuels and building a just world powered by community-led renewable energy for all. She’s also a long-time immigrant rights activist, media professional, cultural organizer, and multidisciplinary artist/deejay based in New York City. She previously worked for the New York Immigration Coalition for close to seven years where she headed the organization’s communications and media relations strategy. Through her work at NYIC, she became an immigration policy expert, using her skills in media and communications to shift narratives on immigration and immigrants themselves. She was a lead organizer in recent efforts to push back against Trump’s executive orders in his first week in office that mandated a Muslim Ban and increased enforcement and raids against immigrant communities. In 2017, she decided to move on to 350.org and bring a migration perspective to the critical work of climate justice. At 350.org, she has led communications for the largest climate mobilizations and helped popularize and shift the narrative on climate as a critical social and racial justice issue. As a cultural organizer and deejay, she has performed across North America and she uses her artistry to create intentional community spaces for queer and immigrant people of color. In 2018-2019, Thanu held New York University’s Asian Pacific American Institute Artist-in-Residence, which she used to curate critical conversations on migration, climate, and the arts. She also was selected to be part of The Shed’s Open Call 2019, where she produced an audiovisual piece on migrant stories. She has an MA in communications from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BA in critical media studies and international development from Hampshire College.
Image: “Nature’s Watching” by Reynaldo García Pantaleón