Announcing the 5th Annual SJCon: “Health & Environmental Justice: Constructing Coalitions at the Intersections of Extraction, Militarism, and Climate Collapse”
Friday, April 19 and Saturday, April 20, 2024
FROM 8:30 AM TO 5:30 PM
PRESENTED VIRTUALLY (ON ZOOM) WITH SOME IN-PERSON SESSIONS
WSU SJCon is an interdisciplinary social justice conference launched in 2019 by WSU graduate students in coalition with BIPOC- and LGBTQIA2S-led groups. We are pleased to accept proposals for presentations, panels, films, creative and multimodal media, art, and workshops that focus on action-based approaches to building and sustaining coalitions across communities.
Despite ever-more alarming annual reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), globally in 2023, carbon emissions hit a new record high. Meanwhile, low wealth frontline climate communities in the United States and globally contend with ever more erratic and catastrophic weather.
Climate collapse is a biproduct of colonial violence and imperialism. Climate justice organizing, however, has yet to really tackle the carbon impacts of war and militarism. The U.S. military is the largest single institutional emitter of carbon worldwide. The economy of the Pacific Northwest is interwoven with the military-industrial-carceral complex. BIPOC communities locally and globally bear disproportionate environmental burdens, from tsunamis to nuclear waste, to oil and chemical spills.
As of 2022, more than 1500 institutions globally “with over $40 trillion in assets, have committed to some level of fossil fuel divestment.” Still, more action is needed to mobilize institutions of higher education, faith communities, unions, and local and state governments to divest from extractive industries–along with the war industries they fuel.
As academics and community organizers, we acknowledge the need to move beyond theorizing social problems. Social justice requires action, but that action must be rooted in lived experiences and the land, which connect us all.