We Need Black Girl Environmental Futures

• In Event: Speculative Methodologies and Anti-Racist Curricular Practice: Building Curricular Futures Beyond Anti-Blackness

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores the potential of Black Girlhood pedagogies in an environmental humanities course co-created with Black girls. It asks: What happens when we tend to Black girls’ environmental and climate imaginaries? What do Black girls envision for more livable futures? And what do they believe is necessary for those futures to be realized? Through centering Black girls as co-theorists, this work contributes to both environmental and curriculum scholarship by asserting that educators must engage Black girls’ dreams, diasporic knowledge systems, and critiques of dominant environmental narratives to imagine and build livable, liberatory futures.

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws on Black Girlhood Studies, speculative fiction, and environmental humanities. Building on the work of scholars like Tomin & Collis (2019), Brown (2024), and Hayes (2024), I argue that Black girls’ speculative narratives offer vital critiques of governmental, neoliberal, and technoscientific environmental solutions while generating alternate ecological worldviews and future possibilities. These stories are grounded in Afro-diasporic knowledge systems and in their embodied experiences as Black youth navigating U.S. sociopolitical and educational systems. Through speculative storytelling, Black girls position themselves as multifaceted leaders with visions beyond carceral systems, environmental extraction, and racial capitalism.

Methods/Data
The study centers an environmental humanities course I designed for an experimental college. Drawing on [Panelist’s, 2019] 5-part speculative writing method, students engaged with mentor texts by Octavia Butler, Marisol Cortez, and Indigenous writers including Waubgeshig Rice to craft speculative stories addressing environmental and climate degradation in their communities (2019). Students worked in literary circles to discuss intersecting legacies of violence and engaged in arts-based praxis to create stories rooted in cultural values, imagination, and critical theory. Data includes student reflections, final speculative stories, and practitioner reflections. These stories illustrate how Black girls use imagination as method and assert alternatives.

Results
Students addressed urgent environmental issues, including food waste, walkability, and land use through speculative storytelling. Several students crafted cautionary tales critiquing green capitalism, wealth accumulation, and escapist environmental solutions. These stories exposed how top-down or technocratic approaches often reproduce the inequalities they claim to solve, including the displacement of poor and global South communities. Others challenged carceral logics by centering mutual care and collective action in imagined futures. Students also reworked personal experiences of grief, loss, and disparity into alternate worlds grounded in justice and equity. Through these speculative futures, Black Girls assert themselves as theorists and world-builders, expanding environmental discourse to include intersectional critique, cultural memory, and liberatory possibility.

Scholarly Significance
This paper contributes to curriculum theory, Black Girlhood Studies, and environmental education by showing how speculative fiction enables Black girls to theorize climate justice futures. Their stories challenge dominant paradigms and assert diasporic epistemologies as necessary for just planetary futures. This work responds to calls for youth-centered, culturally sustaining research and pushes the field to take Black girls’ knowledge seriously. By centering creative, arts-based, and speculative methodologies, this paper offers a pedagogical model for co-creating curriculum that supports Black girls in education and beyond.

Author

• Maya Revell, University of Oregon