Environmental Justice Worldmaking

Building Collaborative, Community-Centered Solutions

In October 2024, the Environmental Justice Worldmaking team hosted a two-day symposium and People’s Assembly at the University of Minnesota, bringing together scholars, community members, and guest speakers from the U.S. and abroad to share their experiences and perspectives on environmental justice.

Environmental Justice Worldmaking: Redistribution and Reciprocity for a Just Transition (EJW), one of eleven Grand Research Challenge (GRC) projects supported by Humanities Without Walls (HWW), is a collaboration among the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table, the University of Minnesota Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, the University of Minnesota Department of African American & African Studies, and Spelman College. The GRC project grant provides three years of funding of for cross-institutional teams pursuing research with a commitment to methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution.

As elucidated on their website, EJW acknowledges that environmental justice is a continuous struggle led by African American and Indigenous activists against the racially targeted disposal of toxic waste and pollutants in their communities, a consequence of capitalist-industrial practices. The team aims to empower people of color, who bear the brunt of harm done to their environment, to participate in local solutions to these climate crises.

Dr. Rose Brewer—principal investigator for EJW and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities—emphasized the importance of local voices in the October symposium.

“We started with a symposium that was more rooted at the university, and then we went into the community and held a People’s Assembly, which is a long-standing practice that organizers and communities have engaged in around the world as a democratic process, to move forward a set of decision-making and democratization efforts,” she said.

Among the goals of the symposium was to feature grassroots voices and their connection to the work that is happening (often in isolation) on campuses. “We wanted to introduce the broader intellectual community at the University of Minnesota to the work that we've been doing,” Brewer said, “and also ensure that community voices were highly featured, to connect their knowledge production to some of the work that's happening on the campus.”

Read the full story on the Humanities Without Walls website.