Chicago Climate Futures
- Soleil Smith
- Pronouns
- she/her
UNDERGRAD | Chicago is one of the greatest teachers in the world when it comes to environmental justice, racism, futurity, and possibility. In this 200-level course, students will get their hands dirty exploring sociological perspectives in everything environmental–both “natural” and “built.” Chicago has been and continues to be an incubator for projects of environment, place making, and community. These projects are all patterned by racialized, gendered, and classed forces that maintain or challenge dominant structures of oppression.
Together we will consider who is empowered to make decisions about where and how we live (both human and non-human), and how we can take that power back in big and small ways. We will also contest what centers of knowledge matter most in understanding, challenging, and constructing the world around us by learning from below and from outside the boundaries of our classroom.
About
Soleil Smith is a 5th year PhD student at the University of Illinois Chicago. Specializing in Political and Environmental Sociology, their research focuses primarily on state repression of environmental movements, the interplay between colonialism, imperialism, and conservation; and the contemporary proliferation of spatial fixes in green space. She is concerned with the ways that power is displayed within the landscape and how that power can be disrupted from below. This focus informs her teaching agenda, putting together courses that emphasize collectively working to understand power in all its forms and our role as social, political, and ecosystem actors. She has recently taught an abolition and environmental justice focused iteration of Race and Ethnicity 425 and is currently crafting Chicago Climate Futures. Chicago Climate Futures is a 200 level undergraduate course that gets students to consider how we make meaning of land, life, and the futures that we try to build over and against the forces of capitalism and white supremacy in the second city.