"Frontline communities in struggle for Environmental Justice"
537 Heller Hall and live stream option
Abstract- Frontline Communities teach us that the struggle for Environmental justice is a praxis. By this we mean our vision of another world, for a just transition from fossil fuel violence, is about theory and practice. It requires moving in the work with intentionality, critical reflection and practice for redistribution, reciprocity, and change to occur. As Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson states, “People denied their agency and power and subjected to external authority need vehicles to exercise their self-determination and exert their power. The question is what are those vehicles? This talk articulates how some Frontline Communities have engaged in change for environmental transformation. It also interrogates how structures of power and capitalist extractivism and exploitation make it a difficult and protracted struggle. One example lifted up in the talk is the HERC trash burner fight in Minneapolis discussing communities and organizers committed to shutting it down in North/Northeast Minneapolis.
About the Speaker
Rose M. Brewer, PhD is The Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor and past chairperson of the Department of African American & African Studies, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She is an affiliate faculty member in the Departments of Sociology and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. An activist scholar, Professor Brewer publishes extensively on Black radical feminism, political economy, social movements, race, class, gender and social change. She was a founding board member of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide; a past board member of United for a Fair Economy, and a founding member of the Black Radical Congress. She is the Principal Investigator of the Humanities Without Walls study, “Environment Justice Worldmaking.” And, she is the 2024-2025 President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP). As a core organizer of the 2007, 2010 and 2015 US Social Forums, the struggle for social transformation in those Forums centered the environmental justice fights of Frontline Communities. Indeed, her commitment is to change the world for people and the planet.