Join us for the third session in our Fall 2024 Lunch & Learn series on Pedagogies of Care with Dr. Hannah Conway, Assistant Professor of Environmental History. This series follows the inaugural Spring Lunch & Learn series, and both build on the 2023 Emerging Pedagogies Summit hosted by Duke Learning Innovation and Lifetime Education. We recognize that “pedagogies of care” is a broad subject which could encompass many areas, and Dr. Conway’s session is titled “Centering Southeastern Native Sovereignty in Environmental Justice.”

The Environmental Justice (EJ) movement emerged from the activism of Black Southern communities in the 1980s and quickly found common cause with Indigenous activists in both the US and abroad. This connection emerged most visibly, perhaps, at the Oceti Sakowin camp on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016, a movement that had lasting impacts on the landscape of modern EJ organizing and the criminalization of protests in opposition to projects deemed to be “critical infrastructure.” In the US South, however, the involvement of Native Nations in the environmental justice movement has been complicated by the disconnection of Southeastern Native removal, the uneven landscape of federal and state recognition for Southeastern Native Nations, and the complexities of race and anti-Blackness in the South and in Indian Country.

How does centering Southeastern Native sovereignty in Environmental Justice work and education shift both our historical understandings of when environmental racism began as well as the forms of “justice” the EJ movement can and should push for? How has Native activism shaped the form and function of EJ organizing in the US South? What role should Native science play in guiding environmental research and policy? How can EJ organizers build meaningful solidarity between the movements for Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty in the US South? This lunch & learn grapples with these questions by examining recent and ongoing EJ conflicts in the region, the work of Southeastern Native activists, scholarship by researchers at Duke and beyond, and Dr. Conway’s approaches to teaching the environmental history of the US South on Duke campus.

The format of this session will be an hour-long virtual lunch & learn, with about 30 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of discussion/Q&A. This lunch & learn will be recorded and will use Zoom auto-generated captions.