Environmental Justice
“We face so many overlapping and intersecting crises that we can’t afford to fix them one at a time. We need integrated solutions, solutions that radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of good, unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.” ― On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal
Image credit: Image credit: Emebet A. Jigssa. (2023). Earth Satellite Image Imitation Abstract. https://icpac.medium.com/how-can-art-amplify-efforts-to-address-climate-change-7d775b261f08
Dates:
Wednesday, April 23, 2025 | Newark Express, 54 Halsey Street, 2nd Floor, Room 213, Newark, NJ 07102
Time(s): 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Cost: Free and open to the public.
Accommodations: Please submit accommodation requests to sawyerseminar@newark.rutgers.edu by Friday, April 18, 2025.
Overview: The seminar Reparative and Restorative Paradigms for Environmental Justice, examines local and global perspectives to the existential challenges posed by climate change. The seminar will consider how reparative and restorative approaches to environmental justice may offer more inclusive opportunities to re-imagine the terms of citizenship and self-government; ones that embed the interconnectedness of humans and their ecology in culture, politics, and laws. Recent conversations about reparations in the United States have drawn on both history and analyses of current economic, social, and political perspectives to propose reparative practices that range from monetary compensation to targeted policies that address racial disparities in wealth, housing discrimination, and education access, among others. At a wider scale, scholars like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have offered a constructivist view of reparations that proposes a historically informed project of distributive justice that serves a larger and broader world-making process. The project of reparations, therefore, has a forward-facing orientation that by necessity is anchored in the past.
Click here to register for free parking!
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
9:00 – 9:45 AM: Breakfast
9:45 – 10:00 AM: Introductory and Opening Remarks
Dr. Mayte Green Mercado, Associate Professor of History, and the Newark Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice
10:00 – 11:20 AM: Panel Ecocide in the Middle East
Kali Rubaii PhD, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Purdue University
Shourideh C. Molavi PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Forensic Architecture
Amir, Moosavi, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Moderator
11:20 – 11:30 PM: Coffee/Tea Break
11:30 – 12:50 PM: A Conversation with Local and International Environmental Activists and Writers
Noami Jackson, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey – Newark
1:00 – 2:00 PM: Lunch
2:00 – 3:20 PM: Green Amendments: Legal and Constitutional Frameworks for Environmental Justice
Commissioner Shawn M. LaTourette, New Jersey’s Commission of Environmental Protection
Maya K. van Rossum, Founder of the Green Amendment For The Generations Movement
Quinn Yeargain PhD, Associate Professor of Law, Michigan State University
Brian Phillips Murphy, Associate Professor of History, Moderator
3:20 – 3:30 PM: Coffee/Tea Break
3:30 – 5:30 PM: Mini Film Screening Mann v. Ford and The Meaning of the Seed
Anita Bakshi PhD, Instructor, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick
Wayne Mann, Ramapough Lenape Nation
Micah Fink, Emmy-Nominated Producer and Director of Mann v. Ford
Jack Tchen, Director, Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, Moderator