Campus Community Conversation - A Path to Climate Justice
Dr. Heather W. Hackman
A Path to Climate Justice: Charting the Intersections of Climate Disruption, Social Justice, and a Sustainable Future
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Meeting ID: 751 048 5069
Description: “The urgent nature of this climate moment cannot be denied nor ignored, and yet identifying the best path forward is often unclear and fraught with contention. In this keynote, Dr. Hackman instructs participants on how to develop and utilize a social justice framework as the guiding lens through which we as a community address the mitigation and adaptation responses to 21st century climate issues. Drawing from a wide range of academic, political and activist bodies of thought, Dr. Hackman helps participants identify our current climate reality, how we got here, and how a social justice lens is necessary for a humane and sustainable response. More specifically, the talk highlights how a social justice lens helps us avoid the traps of technocratic and politically untenable “solutions” while enabling the development of responses that are forward thinking, rooted in human dignity, and place us in balance with the planet and its ecosystem.”
Dr. Hackman has been teaching and training on social justice issues since 1992 and was a professor in the Department of Human Relations and Multicultural Education at St. Cloud State University in St Cloud, Minnesota for 12 years before she began focusing full time on consulting. She has taught courses in social justice and multicultural education (pre-service and in-service teachers), race and racism, heterosexism and homophobia, social justice education (higher education leadership), oppression and social change, sexism and gender oppression, class oppression, and Jewish oppression. She received her doctorate in Social Justice Education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2000 and has taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Westfield State College, Springfield College, St Cloud State University, Hamline University, and the University of St Thomas. In 2005 she founded Hackman Consulting group and consults nationally on issues of deep diversity, equity and social justice and has focused most of her recent training work on issues of racism and white privilege, gender oppression, heterosexism and homophobia, and classism. She has published in the area of social justice education theory and practice, racism in health care (with Stephen Nelson), and is currently working a book examining issue of race, racism and whiteness in education through a model she calls “cellular wisdom”. In 2009, she was awarded a Research Fellowship with the Great Place to Work Institute and has developed corporate training rubrics that combine her social justice content with GPTWI’s “trust” frameworks. She has sat on the board of Minnesota NAME as president, the board of Rainbow Families, has served on numerous committees committed to multicultural and social justice work, and since 2012 has served as a member of the Advisory Council for the White Privilege Conference. Her most recent research and conference presentations have focused on climate change and its intersections with issues of race, class and gender.