The course introduces students to the theories, concepts, and historical development of environmental justice movements and scholarship. We will analyze the intersecting root drivers, including racism, capitalism, colonialism, and cis- heteropatriarchy, and power dynamics that cause environmental injustice and catalyzed the emergence of environmental justice as a movement. We will pay particular attention to the ways that environmental justice has expanded across the United States and the globe and analyze how social differences such as race, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and gender shape environmental justice principles, strategies, and demands.

This seminar examines climate politics through a queer and feminist of color lens. Starting with the central analytical element of environmental justice as the unjust distribution of environmental harms, we analyze the disproportionate, intersectional, gendered harms of climate change inflicted upon queer and trans people. Examining case studies, students interrogate critical environmental justice frameworks and practice using tools from queer theory, queer of color critique, and women of color feminisms to fill the gaps of traditional climate justice frameworks and address its exclusion of queerness. Turning to activism throughout the seminar, students also analyze how queer and feminist social movements fight for climate justice.

The course studies environmental social movements as a response to socio- ecological violence and shift toward environmental justice. First, we ground ourselves with a survey of social movement theory, research, and methods to understand what social movements are and do as well as how social scientists and humanities scholars study them. Next, the course analyzes environmental justice movements across place, from Global South environmental movements to transnational movements, and across issues, from mining to climate change. Finally, we expand environmental justice to interrogate how feminist, Black liberation, queer & trans liberation, and animal liberation movements complicate our understandings of the "environmental" in environmental social movements.