2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

In a forthcoming (Larkins, Wright, and Dann, 2018) article I discuss the need for critical engagement with the politics of difference in undergraduate sustainability courses. The concepts of race, class and gender, sexual orientation form intersecting systems through which oppression is often enacted and experienced. Intersectional approaches to sustainability and environment studies are critical for helping students understand how inequality, and environmental injustice writ large persist, and may help students to understand how some social groups are or are not able to engage around issues of sustainability, ways they are or are not permitted by cultural “elites” or “experts” to engage, or the discipline they may face for doing so by those who perceive their action as a social threat. Moreover, this suggests that in order to create the condition for widespread and equal participation, an understanding of inequitable opportunities must be foregrounded in sustainability texts and teaching, as well as   understanding – and dismantling - of the source of structural inequalities.

In this paper, I build upon this theoretical work to discuss its practical application—through my experience as a new administrator and faculty member at a small liberal arts school who was charged with integrating a sustainability requirement into the core undergraduate curriculum. I draw upon my experiences of crafting university wide learning outcomes based in Agyeman and Evans (2004) just sustainabilities, and discuss methods for overcoming the challenges of lingering environmental privileges (Pulido, 2017) in the student and faculty body. Further, I include examples from student experiences in a course I added to the catalog, Intersectionality and the Environment.  In so doing this paper brings together theoretical arguments for the importance of justice based sustainability pedagogies, and the methods for enacting these.