PNW Just Futures Institute

Sustainability Fellows Program will focus on essential work!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, essential workers represent 34-43% of the U.S. workforce. They earn low wages, have insecure or no benefits, and struggle with the most precarious job security and working conditions of any segment of American labor. Many have limited access to financial, health, legal, and familial support systems while they risk their lives keeping the country afloat during the pandemic. In Oregon, these ironies are especially dangerous for recent Latinx immigrants from Mexico and Central America—including one of the fastest growing indigenous Mayan Mam populations in the U.S.—who remain undocumented or on migrant-labor visas. The interrelated crises of systemic racism, climate change, and the pandemic make clear to us that we need new ways to map, visualize, and imagine the PNW in order to prepare strategically for just transitions that address economic dignity, immigrant rights, and the integrity of our climate.

Various outcomes will emerge from  the Sustainability Faculty Fellows Program and the Just Futures Fellowships, coordinated by UO’s Office of Sustainability (OS) and the UO Student Sustainability Center (SSC), as detailed below. Perhaps the most important result of these projects will be relationships with community partners throughout our region. We have also laid the groundwork for a collaborative digital publication through a recent CEF symposium about PNW essential workers in the time of COVID-19, held in October 2020, and consultations with the Research Action Design (RAD) collective, which specializes in participatory design and community-led research with BIPoC communities. Called the PNW Atlas of Essential Work, this digital publication will be a joint project with our institutional partners, the University of Idaho, Whitman College, and Heritage University, a private institution on the rural Yakama Indian Reservation that is a Native American Service Institution (12% American Indian or Alaska Native) as well as the only Hispanic Serving Inistitution in Washington state (69% Hispanic/Latino). The Atlas will be designed and hosted at UO.

The University of Oregon Office of Sustainability (OS) will re-orient the existing Sustainability Fellows program to focus on essential workers. We will work closely with the Center for Environmental Futures on this program. Our purpose is to foster student-led research into the experiences and lives of essential but invisible workers, showcase this research through digital storytelling, and develop a robust pedagogy for racial justice in the humanities and allied fields. Already, OS program manager Sarah Stoeckl is creating a pedagogical toolkit for faculty and students who want to contribute to the PNW Atlas of Essential Work, and we have begun researching the labor conditions of essential workers on the UO campus, including how these workers have been impacted by recent wildfires. Many of our campus’ essential workers are BIPoC, and some are nontraditional students working on their bachelor’s degree . We will broaden this very local scope to take in Oregon and the region. We hope that the Atlas project empowers BIPoC students to share the too often ignored or erased stories of their families and communities. Furthermore,  this new emphasis on the relationships among economic dignity, anti-racism, and the ecological integrity necessary for sustainable lifeways will allow the UO to build on an existing partnership with Heritage University on the Yakama Reservation.

The Sustainability Fellows program supports faculty who want to build community-engaged research around sustainability into their curriculum. This support comes in the form of a pedagogy workshop, research stipends for participation, funding to bring projects to life, and connections to local community partners. Re-orienting our existing program as part of Sustaining Essential Work furthers the Office of Sustainability’s goal to emphasize social sustainability in our mission and spotlight the interconnections between environmental, social, and racial injustices. Interested faculty will apply for pedagogical support for such community-engaged research in their courses through the OS, in response to a campus-wide advertisement. We will accept ten fellows per year up to three of whom will come from Heritage University. Selection of the fellows will be made by a committee made up of OS administrators and members of  the CEF Steering Committee

Sustainability Fellows will begin the program in the summer by participating in a multi-day workshop and developing their learning plans, for which they will receive an initial stipend ($500). They will have the academic year to implement their pedagogical projects, then the following summer they will share digital artifacts and reflections, for which they receive a second stipend ($1000). Faculty can also request up to $1000 in support funds for class projects, i.e. honoraria for class speakers or community partners, the services of an hourly graduate student to hone undergraduate research into a professional document or artifact, or special supplies. In the third year of the grant, a Sustainability Symposium will showcase the projects developed by faculty and students, including partners at Heritage University. The OS will provide support for the development of class project plans and help identify community partners.

In the second of our campus-wide projects on sustaining racial justice and economic dignity, UO’s Student Sustainability Center (SSC), led by Taylor McHolm, will establish Just Futures Fellowships to support and empower undergraduate and graduate students from frontline communities—those who are the first to bear the brunt of climate change— and to serve community partners. JF Fellows will receive training, mentorship, and summer stipends for their work with community partners, who will also be compensated for their engagement. Students will take methodological workshops and meet with compensated faculty advisors to identify community research needs and match them with partner organizations. JF Fellows will present their research during annual research symposia at community sites. For 2021, probable community partners are Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) and Lummi Nation (Lhaq’temish) tribal leaders, along with a new Lummi-led 501(c)(3), Se’Si’Le. Both PCUN and Se’Si’Le support essential work, promote traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and foster marginalized communities by protecting migrant farmers and native fisheries and fishers. Advertised campus-wide, JF Fellows will be selected following a rigorous application process in which selected fellows demonstrate academic preparedness, awareness of basic environmental justice principles, a demonstrated commitment to helping others, and the pledged support of a faculty advisor for the duration of their fellowships.

To complement efforts to foster community engaged pedagogies by OS and SSC, a team drawn from CEF, SAE, PPPM, OS, the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC), and the InfoGraphics Lab (all UO) will design the PNW Atlas of Essential Work. This Atlas will include histories and speculative futures of essential work, with an emphasis on the histories and stories of BIPoC workers who sustain our regional economy. Our purpose is to empower BIPoC students to share their stories; support faculty in developing racial justice-focused courses and project-based learning; and center Participatory-Action-Research methods and collaborative digital design to create an audiovisual epic of PNW race and labor histories—and futures.

In association with the Atlas, history professor Bob Bussel will lead an interdisciplinary group of scholars to document, evaluate, and host presentations at community centers about immigration in Oregon over the past decade. This research will result in a bilingual report, A State of Immigrants: A New Look at the Immigrant Experience in Oregon, and a webinar series about the rights of essential workers and evolving worker advocacy and activism. Bussel directs the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) at the University of Oregon. He will serve as editor of the State of Immigrants report and coordinate its publication and disseminations. Lola Loustaunau, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Oregon, will conduct interviews with essential workers, provide Spanish translation, and assist Professor Bussel in writing the chapter report on immigrant workers. We will host a symposium, ““The Futures of Work, Climate, and Lifeways in the PNW” with our collaborating institutions (Heritage University, University of Idaho, and Whitman College), at which time we will launch both the PNW Atlas of Essential Work and the University of Idaho’s PNW Atlas of Fire and award prizes for the most innovative contributions from each campus.

Interdisciplinary workshops will address ice and justice in the PNW!

Melting glaciers are an icon of global climate change. But they affect groups of people differently, depending not just on place, but on race, indigeneity, and other social factors. Ice in the PNW (on Rainier, Cascades, Olympics, Hood) is crucial for farming, hydroelectricity, drinking water, recreation, spirituality, and identities. We propose building on existing multidisciplinary strengths at the UO in humanities and natural sciences to create an Ice, Society, and Climate Justice Initiative led by Mark Carey that foregrounds climate justice to understand inequalities, power imbalances, and uneven vulnerabilities beneath melting glaciers. This is crucial for Indigenous communities living around all the PNW’s glacier-covered mountains, for BIPoC communities relegated to floodplains subject to increasing glacier landslides and outburst floods, and for Latinx farmworkers irrigating crops with glacier runoff. This Initiative will tackle these human-ice-justice issues through diverse public events, research, mentorship of students, field trainings, lectures, and courses.

This Ice Initiative will help merge the humanities-based Glacier Lab (run by Carey, a historian) and the natural sciences-based Ocean-Ice Lab (run by oceanographer David Sutherland). Each year the Initiative will also host a field-based workshop run by Carey. The students will come from multiple disciplines in the humanities and natural sciences and may also draw on faculty and students at Oregon State University in nearby Corvallis. Approximately 15 faculty and students will participate in each workshop. These workshops will be held at a glacierized mountain in the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Olympic Mountains) and focus on learning and engagement with experts and community members on glacier change, society, and climate justice. Carey and Sutherland have already led one of these workshops at Mount Hood in 2018, with great success for the 11 graduate student attendees.

This Ice Initiative will also provide three course development stipends for instructors (faculty or advanced graduate students) to develop new UO courses on themes related to ice, society, and climate justice. Awardees may also request up to $300 for teaching materials. The goal is to inspire more interdisciplinary courses that bring a humanities and environmental justice dimension to courses on ice, typically taught in the natural sciences.

Graduate students funded in Years 1 and 2 will serve as research assistants on PNW glaciers, society, and climate justice, particularly work based in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Undergraduate student research awards (two $4,000 stipends each summer) will be offered each summer for students to do humanities-based research on themes of ice, society, and climate justice. These may be independent projects under Carey’s leadership or projects supervised by another faculty member, such as the student’s thesis advisor.

The Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples Initiative will contribute to the Tribal Climate Change Project!

Climate change is wreaking havoc on traditional foods used by Indigenous communities for sustenance and medicine. In the PNW, sea-level rise, drought, and wildfire have been among many climate-related injuries to Indigenous lands. Indigenous communities find it increasingly difficult to perform the labors and ceremonies that maintain cultures ravaged by centuries of colonial violence. For nearly a decade, the Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples (CCIP) Initiative, led by Kathy Lynn and Carey at UO, has fostered inter-generational dialogue among Indigenous leaders, undergraduates, and the general public about the impact of climate change on Indigenous cultures, resources, knowledge production, and traditional lifeways through an annual lecture and related activities. Approximately 200 UO undergraduates have presented their research, as well; some have published their research in peer-reviewed journals or presented at national conferences.

The CCIP Initiative also contributes to the Tribal Climate Change Project (TCCP), part of ENVS since 2009. The TCCP works to understand and address the impacts of climate change on tribal sovereignty, traditional knowledge, and indigenous cultural resources through research, resource development, and policy engagement. The TCCP helps mentor both undergraduate and graduate students, including many Native students. Mellon funds will foster a greater opportunity for the TCCP to contribute to the CCIP Initiative through increased Native student involvement and broad connections with indigenous communities. Specifically, the TCCP will engage graduate student fellows participating in the TCCP as a way to facilitate learning and practice among students, academia, and institutional research.

The PNW Field School will focus on Portland’s historically Black Albina district!

Sustaining Inclusive Cities involves five interrelated initiatives: the Collaborative for Inclusive Urbanism, the Albina African American History StoryMap, the Pacific Northwest Field School, Highway Historical Markers in Oregon, and a region-wide Access and Equity Research Hub, all of which are aimed at sustaining inclusive cities, both physically and culturally.

The Collaborative for Inclusive Urbanism—a cross-disciplinary teaching and research platform for exploring the consequences of exclusionary practices in the built environment—will incorporate three key projects, led by Arroyo, Buckley, Mladinov, and Sandoval: 1) the Albina African American History StoryMap, a collaboration among the Architecture Heritage Center, Vanport Mosaic, Oregon Black Pioneers, and UO’s Historic Preservation program; 2) a new urban racial justice component of the Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School, a summer hands-on program in partnership with the National Park Service and the state parks departments of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and 3) various research projects and studios by the PPPM Access and Equity Research Hub and the Department of Architecture on equity-based planning and housing design in the PNW. Buckley will lead the effort to digitally disseminate the historical records of African Americans in Portland, using StoryMaps, to increase access to Oregon’s African American environmental history as experienced in the historically Black Albina district.

The PNW Field School works with its partners—the National Park Service, the state parks, and historic agencies in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho—to identify experts in the topics relevant to each field school site. With this Mellon grant, the PNW Field School will focus on the preservation of a project significant to Portland’s historically Black Albina district. Each project also draws on various craftspeople, with special skills for replicating historical materials, depending on the type of work needed at each site. To select participants, the PNW Field School will work with the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s (VAF) new Mellon-funded African American Field School Initiative to identify and select a diverse group of students for the field school. We will also work with the VAF initiative to identify appropriate craftspeople to teach in the Albina field school in a way that honors Black history.

Alongside this project by the PNW Field School, Pulido will lead the creation of a website to highlight and disseminate findings from her database-in-progress, Highway Historical Markers in Oregon. This database is currently being created by a team of students who are usually underrepresented in undergraduate research at universities. Our goal is to analyze how such markers and landscapes represent settler colonization and white supremacy, especially in terms of land and resource use. Highway Historical Markers in Oregon will illuminate the nature of regional racial narratives and how Oregon narrates its past.

The Access and Equity Research Hub will study the re-emergence of equity-based planning within the context of land use, transportation, and housing in the PNW. In large part, this renewed attention has emerged because the region’s cities are now grappling with increased racist tensions and increasing income inequality. Social movements such as Black Lives Matter, DREAMERS, and those fighting gentrification and displacement create an opportunity for urban planners and designers to engage in meaningful efforts to implement equitable programs and initiatives. Research will focus on the PNW to trace the historical evolution of equity as a concept from the Progressive Era  to the present. We will analyze the transformation of equity as a concept, explain how it has changed throughout the evolution of planning practice, and undergird equity as a planning approach within the region’s famous growth-boundary planning history.

Latinx growth in the PNW represents the largest growth of ethnic diversity in the region and signals an increased need for equitable housing. While the housing crisis is a global phenomenon, its impact on Latinx communities is especially acute. Current debates about equitable housing focus mostly on the economic aspects of accessibility, often failing to recognize the cultural differences that make residential design and the urban environment truly inclusive. To complement research on equity-based planning and design, the Access and Equity Research Hub and the Department of Architecture will conduct a series of three architectural design studios over three years: two of them being “vertical” studios (one-term projects developed by a combination of graduate and undergraduate students) and one a “terminal” studio (capstone project developed over the entirety of the academic year). These studios will examine the future of Latinx housing in major metropolitan areas of the Pacific Northwest, in three new immigrant gateways: Cully district (Portland)—home to the largest urban Latinx population in Oregon, Caldwell (suburban Boise metro area), and neighborhoods along the Duwamish Waterway (South Seattle).

Through applied-research and design, students will learn about inclusive community-based design practices for new immigrant populations in the largest urban metros of the PNW. Students will work with Verde (environmental justice advocacy) and Hacienda Community Development Corporation (Portland), the Centro de Comunidad y Justicia (Boise), and the Environmental Coalition of South Seattle, all of which will assist in identifying the opportunity sites, foster connections between students and community members, offer initial input on specificities of housing design for the Latinx population, and provide ongoing feedback on students’ projects. This focus on learning from diverse communities to inform design towards racial justice will mean a more inclusive curriculum reflecting the experiences of a growing Latinx and Indigenous Latin American student body at UO. By the end of this three-year project, we will produce design guidelines for accessible and culturally inclusive housing models and a series of student projects, which will be presented in annual exhibitions at the UO’s College of Design and as a part of the Atlas of Essential Work. This research team will also present our findings at the annual American Institute of Architects conference and produce a bilingual digital booklet shared with students and community partners.

A digital humanities project will document how Afro-Caribbean, AfroIndigenous, African American, and Indigenous healers have adapted their traditional ecological and medicinal knowledge in the PNW!

The Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing Knowledge within AfroIndigenous Communities Project, housed by UO Libraries, will expand its scope through this initiative, led by Reyes-Santos, Lara, and the Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) librarians and technical assistance team. This digital humanities project will document how Afro-Caribbean, AfroIndigenous, African American, and Indigenous healers—essential workers themselves—have adapted their traditional ecological and medicinal knowledge (TEK) in the PNW. Recently, we held a roundtable discussion with Native and Afro-descendant healers and elders focusing on traditional ecological, medicinal, herbal, and ceremonial approaches to COVID-19. This was a bilingual presentation in Spanish and English, simultaneously disseminated over Zoom and Facebook Live platforms and viewed by at least 1,200 people all over the world in the span of two weeks. The website includes a K-12 teaching resources guide. Our purpose is to disrupt regional histories of white nationalism through the recognition of traditional Indigenous, AfroIndigenous, and Black healers as essential workers in their communities in the PNW.

With Mellon funding, we will incorporate storytelling and healing practices in conversations about TEK; document and disseminate how these healers deploy TEK to support communities disproportionately impacted by climate change, its attendant environmental disasters, and the pandemic; foster and document TEK exchanges between growing migrant AfroIndigenous communities and local Native and African American communities; train students to engage in related climate and racial-justice research; and recruit students of color and working-class students as research interns. Reyes-Santos and Lara will also produce edited audio/video interviews, ethnobotanical surveys, and pedagogical resources, in collaboration with students of color, migrant students, and first-generation students. To support this work, we will recruit student interns and a graduate employee from historically underserved communities,  which will help develop a pipeline of professionals trained to work with Indigenous, AfroIndigenous, and Black communities in the PNW.