Student Families for Sustainable Communities: Reflecting on Our Resistance to University Gentrification

• In Event: Activating Disruptive Power: Transformative Possibilities for Eco-Justice in Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Our children’s first homes were in student family housing on a large Canadian university campus. With neighbors from around the world, kids grew up hearing dozens of languages in the community garden, eating innumerable combinations of spices at potlucks, walking and playing safely on car-free forested walkways, and attending cooperative and campus daycares on site. Environmental education was built into this sustainable community (Brussoni, Olsen, Pike, & Sleet, 2012; Duncan, 1998; Maller, 2009; Petch & Henson, 2000; Taylor, Kuo & Sullivan, 2002; Timperio, Crawford, Telford & Salmon, 2004). Yet, as is common in neoliberal times, value is assigned through one’s contributions to the global economy, making the children and family members of graduate students virtually invisible (Brown, 2015) and green spaces of no value except as lost opportunities for real estate developments. With gentrification on the rise in North America (Ellen & Ding, 2016), the displacement of student families, trees, and gardens to make way for more condos was unsurprising.

The EE SIG asks us to consider the “dreams, possibilities, and necessity of environmental education for the public” with a particular eye toward working in collectives to address the assault on displaced peoples. When faced with the displacement of our community, we organized. The purpose of this paper is to analyze our activism through the lens of disruptive power.

Our collective resistance to the displacement of student family housing echoes Agyeman’s (2005) definition of environmental justice, described “as a local, grassroots, or ‘bottom-up’ community reaction to external threats to the health of the community, which have been shown to disproportionately affect people of color and low-income neighborhoods” (pp. 1-2). While student families possess many privileges, we also contend with numerous social injustices, particularly financial insecurity, precarious employment, and, for female academics raising children, barriers to full participation and equal opportunities in academic career development (Mason, Wolfinger & Goulden, 2013).

Between classes, thesis writing, dirty diapers, and sleepless nights, our efforts included creating coalitions among existing student groups, conducting our own community needs assessment, researching our community through course partnerships, postcard campaigns to administrators, participatory social media activism, the formation of a democratic neighborhood association, and more. Considering the disruptive nature of this work, we recall imagining a children’s “play-in” at a Board of Governor’s meeting, collectively refusing to pay our rent, or building guerilla playground installations, but disruptive dreaming did not equate to disruptive action. Should we have chosen disruptive pathways, it is possible that our impact would have been greater. As it was, the extent of the university’s internal, administrative mobilization mitigated our collective efforts. Nevertheless, learning from these choices and continuing to tell the story of our fight for family housing re-ignites the disruptive potential of our campaigns.

For environmental educators, the significance of this story is manifold. From it, we learn the importance of urban design in maximizing social and ecological interactions, and building the relationships required for collective action. We also identify new possibilities for how research, teaching, and activism come together while pursuing the dream of environmental education for the public.

Authors

• Nora Timmerman, Northern Arizona University

• Julia Kathleen Ostertag, Self-employed