Dr. Hackman will be presenting this workshop at the upcoming AASHE conference. As evidenced by this national moment, a lack of critical understanding of social justice issues makes achieving global sustainability goals near impossible. Conversely, thoughtful attention to social justice issues affords any individual or organization the capacity to rise to the challenge of complex global work across lines of race, gender, class and disability (to name a few). More specifically, doing sustainability work through a social justice lens supports the urgent need for national and global collaboration with respect to climate, environmental and sustainability issues and greatly improves the likelihood of the development of deeply rooted and long-term climate, environmental and sustainability solutions.
As such, this cross-disciplinary workshop is designed to take campus sustainability work to a deeper level, via the use of a critical “social justice lens” (SJL), so as to improve its efficacy, deepen its reach and power, and ultimately align it more closely with 21st century climate realities. Based on workshops Dr. Hackman has presented across the country, this interactive session begins by setting forth the core components of a critical SJL, then makes explicit connections for its use and transformative import in this current climate change / sustainability moment, and concludes with the presentation of concrete steps regarding the application of a SJL to sustainability work on our campuses.