The Black Ecologies Signature Lab at the ISGRJ draws together threads in order to generate scholarship, artistry, and other resources that aid in infusing public and scholarly discourse as well as our broader cultural imaginaries with the insights generated through the analytical insights, methods, and theories related to Black Ecologies and its closely allied fields, including Black Geographies. The lab provides a suite of digital projects, speaker series and workshops, community engagement events, teaching and undergraduate program development, and publications to foment Rutgers as a major center for Black ecological studies for faculty, students, and community.
Black Ecologies joins the forces of its two conveners, Teona Williams and J.T. Roane and bolsters their already-in-motion existing collaborative forces into a more powerful coalition.
J.T. Roane is Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, Africana Studies and Geography, at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Dr. Roane is a historian broadly concerned with matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is the lead of the Black Ecologies Lab and former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS).
Teona Williams is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography and an ISGRJ Named Term Chair. Her current work explores the role of disaster and hunger, in shaping Black feminist ecologies from 1930-1990s. Specifically, she follows a cadre of rural Black feminists who articulated visions of food sovereignty, overhauled antiblack disaster relief, and vigorously fought for universal basic income, radical land reform, and food and clean water access as a human right.
The "Being Together in Place" convening brought together international scholars, local activists, students, and community organizers, including Dr. Monica White, a senior scholar of sustainable community food systems, for a phenomenal and transformative discussion of Black Ecologies, placemaking, and shared struggles for spatial and ecological justice between Mississippi, Rio de Janeiro, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, St. John, and other locations.
The Black Ecologies collective was pleased to launch the Blackecologies Zine in 2024, an open resource containing sixty-six pages of essays, interviews, short fiction, poetry, experimental field notes, and original art that examine the shared vulnerabilities and possibilities between Black communities facing overlapping social crises and climate emergency in Virginia, South Africa, Jamaica, Trinidad, Louisiana, and beyond. This is currently in digital form, and we intend to also print and deposit it at libraries in the various communities included in the project through the contributors to extend its utility beyond the enduring digital divide, especially in more rural areas.
We're proud to announce that the Blackecologies Zine has been honored with a Platinum Award in the 2024 MarCom Awards, administered by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals!
The MarCom Awards honor excellence in marketing and communication while recognizing the creativity, hard work, and generosity of industry professionals. Since its inception in 2004, MarCom has evolved into one of the largest, most respected creative competitions in the world. Each year, about 6,500 print and digital entries are submitted from dozens of countries.
The Public Humanities Network Award for Leadership in Practice and Community recognizes and celebrates exemplary public humanities work engaged with communities.
