This paper examines environmental justice movements focusing on how organizers rewrite stories, m... more This paper examines environmental justice movements focusing on how organizers rewrite stories, make artwork, seek to build and grow a different world than the one we currently inhabit. Specifically, I ask: What does environmental justice look like in the face of interconnected disasters caused by environmental and state violence in its myriad forms: climate change, gentrification, policing and deportation regimes? I argue that culture and media, in the form of abolitionist climate justice narratives, offer a partial and important response. Abolitionist climate justice narratives enact an imaginative reclamation and recognition in a brutalizing economic and political system that seeks to deny the rights of survival for vulnerable peoples and communities, animals and the ecosystems. Cultural production and storytelling from climate justice social movements build kinship between people of color with animals, and to imagine what abolition might look, in imagining conceptions of home, and a politics of mutual aid, care, and solidarity in the face of climate crises that have provoked tribalism, closed borders, violence, and individualism. My case study is a particular web-series called The North Pole that shows how cultural production matters in defining, expanding and broadening the concept of abolitionist climate justice narratives and their audiences within the cultural sphere. I use a close reading of The North Pole and its characters within the broader context of its production grounded squarely within the climate justice movement. Abolitionist climate justice narratives bridge distinct strands of abolitionist praxis: against incarceration (prisons/policing, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2 Julie Sze and Border Patrol), carbon emissions, and speciesism, or hierarchy between human/non-human populations. The North Pole represents the different strands of abolitionism, and thus is an important bridge between parallel conversations and critiques that have not well integrated. In bridging these abolitionist theories and movements, The North Pole has potential to speak with and expand the conversations between each. Expanding these conversations preempts a potential critique of each to build broader solidarities in imagining a more just and liberatory world without incarceration, climate chaos, and animal exploitation.
This paper examines environmental justice movements focusing on how organizers rewrite stories, m... more This paper examines environmental justice movements focusing on how organizers rewrite stories, make artwork, seek to build and grow a different world than the one we currently inhabit. Specifically, I ask: What does environmental justice look like in the face of interconnected disasters caused by environmental and state violence in its myriad forms: climate change, gentrification, policing and deportation regimes? I argue that culture and media, in the form of abolitionist climate justice narratives, offer a partial and important response. Abolitionist climate justice narratives enact an imaginative reclamation and recognition in a brutalizing economic and political system that seeks to deny the rights of survival for vulnerable peoples and communities, animals and the ecosystems. Cultural production and storytelling from climate justice social movements build kinship between people of color with animals, and to imagine what abolition might look, in imagining conceptions of home, and a politics of mutual aid, care, and solidarity in the face of climate crises that have provoked tribalism, closed borders, violence, and individualism. My case study is a particular web-series called The North Pole that shows how cultural production matters in defining, expanding and broadening the concept of abolitionist climate justice narratives and their audiences within the cultural sphere. I use a close reading of The North Pole and its characters within the broader context of its production grounded squarely within the climate justice movement. Abolitionist climate justice narratives bridge distinct strands of abolitionist praxis: against incarceration (prisons/policing, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2 Julie Sze and Border Patrol), carbon emissions, and speciesism, or hierarchy between human/non-human populations. The North Pole represents the different strands of abolitionism, and thus is an important bridge between parallel conversations and critiques that have not well integrated. In bridging these abolitionist theories and movements, The North Pole has potential to speak with and expand the conversations between each. Expanding these conversations preempts a potential critique of each to build broader solidarities in imagining a more just and liberatory world without incarceration, climate chaos, and animal exploitation.
This book review symposium for Shiloh Krupar's Hot Spotter's Report includes an introduction by m... more This book review symposium for Shiloh Krupar's Hot Spotter's Report includes an introduction by myself, reviews from Julie Sze, Ryan Griffis, and Cindi Katz, and a response by Shiloh Krupar
My riff on my book in the context of midcentury kitchen cabinets salvaged from Spring Valley/Deat... more My riff on my book in the context of midcentury kitchen cabinets salvaged from Spring Valley/Death Valley, the birthplace of US chemical weapons of mass destruction.
Uploads
Papers by Julie Sze