The Center for Sustainable Communities presents the Spring Speaker Series: Global Sustainability Scholars. Please join us in welcoming the  first speaker in this series, Kishi Animashaun Ducre, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Associate Professor, African American Studies at Syracuse University. The lecture is titled Shapeshifters, Changemakers: Black Mothers and Environmental Justice. 

This talk is a broad overview of Kishi Animashaun Ducre's research on race, gender, agency and environmental injustice, specifically the reliance on photovoice methodology as a tool to capture how impoverished Black mothers conceptualize risk and the spatial strategies that they employ to manage those risks. The shapeshifters refers to the ethnography by Aimee Meredith Cox (Duke, 2015) entitled, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Cox refers to the young Black women that she encounters in a homeless shelter and their “choreography” to make a space for themselves amidst racist and sexist structures and narratives of their pathology. Intersectionality allows theorists to specify the ways in which poor Black women are marginalized by multiple systems of oppression. However, it is equally important to illustrate ways in which they serve as changemakers in the face of environmental assault and structural violence. If we listen, they have a lot to say.