Environmental Justice Art Museum

research project, spring 2022-present

Ecological problems such as global warming, pollution, and resource scarcity disproportionately impact poor people, racialized minorities, women, and other disenfranchised groups, revealing environmental justice to be an increasingly important social, political, public health, economic, legal, and cultural issue. Recent acts of police violence and the coronavirus pandemic have reconfirmed longstanding patterns of brutal racism affecting people of color. Science and law tend to approach environmental justice without considering cultural, visual, and aesthetic dimensions of such problems.

This project explored the relationship between art and environmental justice in a variety of contemporary contexts, emphasizing the role of imagination and creativity in critical inquiry, public communication, education, and activism. Through development of an online Environmental Justice Art Museum (EJAM) in collaboration with Dr. Alan C. Braddock, this project proposed to create an important virtual platform where people at William & Mary and beyond could learn about the power of creative collaboration to reimagine ecological conditions and challenge environmental injustice.

I also helped provide student input for W&M's newest Environmental Humanities degree track, which explores cultural and creative dimensions of ecology and environmental justice through art, stories, historical research, and other forms of interdisciplinary study and imaginative expression. A rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the Environmental Humanities emphasize culture and imagination as key elements of ecological understanding that other discourses (in science, policy, and law) generally do not engage. Drawing from a variety of disciplines including art and art history, environmental history, literary ecocriticism, cultural anthropology and philosophy, gender studies, critical race study, geography, and more, research in the Environmental Humanities is fundamentally intersectional.

Advisor Alan C. Braddock