Labor Ecologies: Race, Indigeneity, and Environmental Justice in Pacific Northwest Coastal Economies

This Collaboration Studio will develop a theoretics, place-based pedagogy, and relational foundations for a long term, externally funded, and publicly-engaged research program that intervenes in key debates within critical race and Indigeneous studies, labor studies, and the environmental humanities. Today, throughout the Pacific Northwest, myriad actors refuse, resist, and are renegotiating ongoing expressions of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental degradation. Native nations, workers’ coalitions, and environmental organizations, for example, all labor to produce their visions of sovereignty, economic, and “coastal justice” in both critical and strategic engagement with state, corporate, and non-governmental institutions. Through this project we will trace these multidimensional Labor Ecologies, paying particular attention to dynamic relations of time (past, present, and future), social power (especially race and Indigeneity), and multi-species relations (human and more-than-human nature).