Environmental & Climate justice in the u.s. South

Much of our ongoing work at STAGES Lab involves describing, documenting, imagining and co-designing climate just futures in the U.S. South. We use community-based, participatory, and artistic methods to do so. Stories of climate and environmental justice work across the region abound and intersect with the complicated industrial, environmental, labor, and cultural histories that shape Southern lives and landscapes. This current body of work aims to describe, imagine, and co-design climate justice futures in and from the U.S. South using community-based research approaches and creative methods including storytelling, memoir, interviews, oral histories, poetic inquiry.

This work is primarily taking place in Birmingham, Alabama (in collaboration with the Institute for Human Rights at the University of Alabama at Birmingham) and North Carolina (in partnership with the North Carolina Climate Justice Collective), and will soon be taking place in Mississippi. 

In Birmingham, our team has recently been awarded a Level 1 Seed Grant from the Penn State Social Science Research Institute for our pilot research entitled “Characterizing Community-Based Environmental and Climate Resilience Efforts in the Deep South through Visual Participatory Methods and Narrative Interviews: A Pilot Study in Birmingham, Alabama." We are working on a publicly-available StoryMap that shares interviews and stories of environmental justice advocacy in the city alongside an academic manuscript.