Visualizing Justice: Urban Environments, Climate Challenges, and Just Sustainable Futures

Catalog description

This course combines practical skill building, active learning, and engagement activities to support local communities around issues of environmental and urban justice, climate challenges, and sustainable futures for New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast. While examining the fields of data literacy and interpretation, artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic bias, and the ethical considerations about how data is collected, interpreted, and used for policy decision making and community engagement (data justice fields). The substantive emphasis of the course will be on the use of data for advocacy and support of communities involving urban justice (e.g., inequality, policing, carceral rights, poverty, housing, etc.), environmental justice, (e.g., polluted neighborhoods, indoor and outdoor air pollution, water and soil pollution, etc.), all in an effort to move New Orleans and surrounding communities from their climate challenges to just sustainable futures. The course will also explore community empowerment through the instruction of techniques of data advocacy, citizen science, political activism, etc.