Category: featured

My teaching and research are dedicated to what I call ‘Critical Environmental Justice Pedagogies’ – best practices for cultivating diversity and inclusion and teaching climate change (coined in concert with Robert Brulle and David Pellow’s concept, and Pellow’s 2017 book). These teaching strategies ask us to engage across forms of difference and critically consider the complex – and changing – meanings of being human. Email me for more information and a list of resources.

My pedagogy is also informed by my:

• Master’s degree in Education, and two Master’s degrees in English
• Fifteen years of teaching experience, including instruction of secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and nontraditional students, as well as other teachers.
• Training in implicit bias recognition, teaching race and ethnicity, and the interdisciplinary pedagogy of Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Across the Disciplines, and the National Writing Project, as well as the methods of genealogy, American, Indigenous, and culture studies.
• Awards from the Fulbright Program, Eastern Oregon University, Portland State University, and the University of Oregon’s highest recognition – Outstanding Teacher of Composition – for my course on environmental writing. I was also nominated for the University of Oregon’s Diversity and Equity award.

Useful Teaching Resources:

• Books that will change the way you (and your students) look at land
• Yale Climate Connections
• ASLE teaching resources
• First day activities that create a climate of learning

Inspiring examples of art-ivism on climate change:

• The Center for Land Use Interpretation
• “Is this how you feel?” Scientists’ micro-memoirs on climate change
• Zina Saro-Wiwa’s “The Turquoise Meat Inside” and why we must “decolonize environmentalism.”
• Artists & Climate Change
• Dear Climate
• 18 artists on climate change and conservation
• The Yes Men and scholarship on them from Heather Davis, Nicole Seymour, and Shelley Streetby (and many others!)

Some favorite syllabi:

• Standing Rock Syllabus
• Black Lives Matter Syllabus
• Prison Abolition Syllabus

I had the honor of being invited to give an overview of the environmental humanities to Cornell University’s inaugural graduate course on the field, taught by the incomparable Anindita Banerjee. I wanted to make sure students had a broad understanding of how to get involved, and stay involved, so I compiled this brief overview of selected initiatives, institutions, journals, publications, and upcoming events (email me if you want a copy of this and/or have ideas to add!):

Also, as an important example of how the environmental humanities can be effective means of protest, Terry Tempest Williams, professor of environmental humanities at University of Utah, along with students from that phd program, successfully bought rights to 1,750 acres of land in order to save it from fossil fuel extraction. Listen to her interview with Democracy Now here.

The Center for Environmental Futures–Environmental Humanities, Justice, and Culture at the University of Oregon has won a 600K award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help foster work across the campus, building on UO’s reputation as a preeminent institution to do environmental issues. Click here for up-to-date CEF events.

I am proud to have been involved with the efforts to establish CEF, under the leadership of Stephanie LeMenager, the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor of English and Environmental Studies, and Marsha Weisiger, the Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History (and many other incredible scholars across campus!).

Find out more in the newsletter! A remarkable presentation from Carla Bengston, the head of the Art department at UO, centered on nonhuman actors intervening in the nature/culture divide. My current favorite is S.C.O.L.D.: Species Calling Out Climate Change Deniers – a project that trains crows to recognize and scold climate change deniers, and communicate to other crows to do the same!

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With the support of University of Oregon’s Philosophy department and a generous grant awarded by the UO Sustainability Center, the University of Oregon held its first Forum on Sustainability and Housing Justice. This event explored the intersections of housing justice and sustainability and was a truly interdisciplinary and community event. Planned by myself and two other PhD candidates – one in Philosophy and one in Theatre Arts – this forum consisted of a fair and a speaking panel. The fair portion hosted groups from the university, organizations from the local and state community and represented a variety of sustainability initiatives such as habitat restoration, transportation justice, and exciting projects like Opportunity Village. The panel brought together five speakers: Erin Moore, a professor in the school of Architecture and Allied Arts; Paul Catino, the Learnscape and Restoration Coordinator at Nearby Nature; Michael Withley from Portland-Based Micro Community Concepts; Andrew Heben of the tiny house building nonprofit organization SquareOne Villages; and Donita Sue Fry, the Youth and Elders Council Coordinator for the Native American Youth and Family Center in Portland. The entire event was aimed at bringing community organizations, activists, volunteers, and scholars together to talk about how to build a more just and sustainable home. The event featured a Conestoga Hut, built on-site and open for the public to learn more about the simple and transformative solutions for the unhoused.