Climate Justice & Environmental Racism ((3))

Catalog description

We will begin with offering a Critical Pacific Islands & Oceania Studies framework for exploring environmental and climate justice issues from an Oceanic perspective to give contexts to the role of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal institutions on Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (NH/PI) communities in the US. This includes Native Hawaiians in Hawai`i, Oceanians living within US territories (Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa), and COFA migrants (the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands). Structured historically and thematically, this course explores the impact of environmental racism on NH/PI communities both in the US and Oceania. Through reading primary and secondary source materials, students will learn to critically analyze and interpret from liberatory frameworks (including an Ethnic Studies framework and Oceanic worldviews) historical trends in environmental resource use in Oceania, understand the connections between imperialism and militarization with a focus on the nuclear-testing era, and examine NH/PI responses and acts of resistance to these oppressive systems.