Racial Politics of Outdoor and Environmental Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Driven by the 2024 AERA Conference question “what is required to imagine educational spaces free of racial injustice,” this session addresses material and theoretical considerations that are necessary to dismantle racial injustice and imagine just futures. Scholars and racialized communities have noted that coloniality and whiteness are ubiquitous in environmental education and the environmental movement (Agyeman 2003, Tuck et. al, 2014, Miller 2017, Nxumalo 2017, Ho and Chang 2021). Recognizing the need to disrupt Eurocentrism while imagining alternative models, the papers in this session will use critical race theory, antiblackness theory, and Afrofuturism to demonstrate the deeply embedded nature of racial injustice in environmental education and provide recommendations for the future of the field (Mbembe, 2015).

Sub Unit

• SIG-Environmental Education

Chair

• Maya Revell, University of Oregon

Papers

• Racialized Knowledge Politics in Environmental Education Institutional Texts: A Case Study - Tallie R Segel, Concordia University - Montreal

• Seeking Black Joy in the Outdoors While Confronting Anti-Blackness: A Doctoral Candidacy Experience - Charissa V. Jones, Oregon State University

• Afro-Futurism and Black Environmental Knowledge - Maya Revell, University of Oregon

• Racial Equity in Outdoor and Environmental Education: Relational Accountability and White Innocence - Spirit Brooks, Oregon State University; Steven Braun, Oregon State University; Kristi Backe, Oregon State University; Kristopher Michael Elliott, Oregon State University; Charissa V. Jones, Oregon State University; Maya Revell, University of Oregon

Discussant

• Tatiana Cherelle Height, University of North Carolina - Charlotte