|
Researcher(s):
Kiaora Motson
ENVS course(s): 295 Initiated: February 2017 Completed: April 2017 Go to project site
|
This project began as an investigation of the Divest movement on the Lewis and Clark campus. Through a partnership with the campus eco-club, SEED, the plan was to explore the motivations of students who support the Divest campaign, a movement to encourage Lewis & Clark to cut investments in fossil fuels. A dinner, by the name of “Divest Fest”, was held in order to gather the students curious in divest in one place where their thoughts on divest could be explored. Our goal with this dinner was to use Divest not only as a focal point of the dialogue, but also as a jumping off point for engaging with larger questions. This did not manifest in the way we anticipated. It became clear from this dinner that this project was going in a direction that was bigger than the Divest movement on campus. What this project has become is an investigation into activism as a whole, with a focus on environmentalism given the timeframe of the project. The final goal of this project was make students think about their own activism, and for us to give them an opportunity to process their motivations in new lights. By exposing them to Environmental Scholarship topics such Grid-Group Cultural Theory and “clumsy solutions”, we hoped that students would be able to identify themselves within the realms of the four types of activism that Cultural Theory presents. Upon presenting our poster at the Festival of Scholars our goals were very much met, and in part exceeded. Students were very open to thinking about activism in these new ways, and revealed conflicts relating to fairness and efficacy, in alignment with Grid-Group categories. Many of them were even able to identify themselves within the framework, or were already understanding of the scholarship without having the language to articulate it. We hope that these ways of analyzing activism can be left behind for future students to look at and figure out where they, as well as their peers, stand on the issues that are important to them, and can figure out ways of bridging the many isms of activism.
References
Hulme, Mike. 2015 Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rayner, Steve. 2014 Wicked Problems. Environmental Scientist 23, no. 2: 3–4.
Verweij, Marco, Mary Douglas, Richard Ellis, Christoph Engel, Frank Hendriks, Susanne Lohmann, Steven Ney, Steve Rayner, and Michael Thompson. 2006 Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World: The Case of Climate Change. Public Administration 84, no. 4: 817–43.