Resistance and Education: Examining the Use and Value of Social Media to Address Issues of Race in Environmental Education

• In Event: 64.064 - Democratizing Social Media for Ecological, Environmental, and Social Justice in a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

Inclusiveness in the environmental field generally has been troubled in various ways by blatant forms of racism, policies of prejudice, and land appropriation (Aguilar, Liddicoat, & McCann, 2017; Taylor, 1997). EE has also contributed to problematic normative assumptions about what it means to be outdoorsy or environmentally concerned through research (see Haluza-Delay, 2013; Johnson, Bowker & Cordell, 2004), uncritical attempts to prescribe narrow values and actions in EE (Gough, 1998), and the marginalization of particular perspectives (Maina-Okori, Koushik, & Wilson, 2017; Marouli, 2002). This has created an “otherness” associated with people of color who do not necessarily conform to these normative assumptions (Russell & Fawcett, 2013). A quick search on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, however, will lead one to many multi-ethnic groups dedicated to the enjoyment of and concern for the outdoors and the environment. In fact, a recent study by Yale’s Climate Change Communication program found “Latinos are much more engaged with the issue of global warming than are non-Latinos” (Leiserowitz, Cutler, & Rosenthal, 2017, p. 3). There is an obvious disconnect between what EE believes it knows about people of color in the environment and the actual connection between people of color and the environment.

While EE scholarship has been slow to examine the intricacies associated with environmental identity and engagement for people of color through a non-normative lens, the movement for people of color to engage in public spaces and social media on this topic has been burgeoning. From Outdoor Afro’s inception in 2009 as a blog to Outdoor Latinos beginnings on Twitter in 2012 to the Outdoor Asian Facebook group initiated in 2016, groups of various ethnic backgrounds have begun to do the multicultural work of EE through social media as public pedagogy. Public pedagogy spaces, simply put, are “spaces, sites, and languages of education and learning that exist outside of the walls of the institution of schools” (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, p. 1). This paper examines the ways in which social media has filled a gap in multicultural EE by attending to the needs of communities of color. Beyond being a space outside of formal education settings, Giroux (2004) contends that public pedagogy has the ability to “bring into being new forms of resistance, raise new questions, and necessitate alternative visions, regarding autonomy and the possibility of democracy itself” (p. 74). Echoing how the Black Lives Matter movement on Twitter has given a voice to youth of color to identify and “challenge dominant ideologies of race” (Carney, 2016, p. 182), this paper uses critical race theory and Giroux’s (2000) notion of public pedagogy as cultural politics to examine how social media spaces have similarly allowed for groups marginalized in the environmental field generally and EE specifically to challenge and resist the normative idea of who belongs in the outdoors. Additionally, through oral histories and textual analysis, this paper seeks to identify how these virtual communities have enabled physical communities of color to organize and to examine their relationships to the environment and outdoors on their own terms.

Author

• Olivia Aguilar, Denison University