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2 books match the query 'Sze, Julie'
Climate Freedoms
Julie Sze
University of Minnesota Press, 2027
A bold reimagining of climate justice as a collective struggle for freedom, grounded in hope, resistance, and transformative change
In Climate Freedoms, Julie Sze reframes climate justice as a freedom movement, offering a new lens on one of the defining crises of our time. Rather than treating despair as inevitable, Sze argues that denial is a prison and despair sustains the status quo, reinforcing systems built on domination and extraction. Alternatively, climate justice movements can advance a positive vision of collective freedom—one rooted in care, reciprocity, and the possibility of livable worlds.
Centering the perspectives of those most impacted and least responsible for climate disasters, Sze engages climate reparations and traces the connections between climate justice and abolitionist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and Black radical traditions. By analyzing movement stories sparked by climate change–induced disasters specifically affecting frontline communities in the Caribbean, Small Island States in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous communities across the United States, Sze explores how environmental harm is inseparable from colonialism and racial capitalism. These community-based movements challenge narrow, individualist notions of freedom, emphasizing shared responsibility and interconnected futures across local and global scales.
Sze develops three interrelated freedoms: the epistemic freedom to recognize injustice, the imaginative freedom to envision alternatives, and the transformative freedom to create change. These freedoms illuminate how climate justice movements cultivate resistance, survivance, and collective continuance in the face of crisis. The result is a form of grounded hope: clear-eyed about ongoing harm, yet committed to building life-affirming futures.
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New Perspectives on Environmental Justice
Gender, Sexuality, and ActivismStein, Rachel
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Women make up the vast majority of activists and organizers of grassroots movements fighting against environmental ills that threaten poor and people of color communities. New Perspectives on Environmental Justice is the first collection of essays that pays tribute to the enormous contributions women have made in these endeavors.
The writers offer varied examples of environmental justice issues such as children's environmental health campaigns, cancer research, AIDS/HIV activism, the Environmental Genome Project, and popular culture, among many others. Each one focuses on gender and sexuality as crucial factors in women's or gay men's activism and applies environmental justice principles to related struggles for sexual justice. The contributors represent a wide variety of activist and scholarly perspectives including law, environmental studies, sociology, political science, history, medical anthropology, American studies, English, African and African American studies, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies, offering multiple vantage points on gender, sexuality, and activism.
Feminist/womanist impulses shape and sustain environmental justice movements around the world, making an understanding of gender roles and differences crucial for the success of these efforts.