Session: Creative Approaches to Advancing Recognition in Social Work Research on Climate and Environmental Justice (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

The ongoing crisis of anthropogenic climate change has prompted social workers across a wide array of practice contexts to take up work related to climate and environmental justice. The scale and scope of this crisis is unprecedented, impacting privileged and marginalized communities alike, yet marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted. Recent eco-social work scholarship calls for researchers to focus on strategies that are rooted in the experiences and frameworks of the oppressed.

In conversation with this work, this symposium brings together scholars who are undertaking collaborative, participatory, and creative approaches to making the impacts of anthropogenic climate change and environmental injustice visible. Specifically, the papers seek to advance the environmental justice principle of recognition through cross-cultural research and discussion that challenges dominant notions of what a more just eco-social world could look like.

Participatory methods are an increasingly common tool for challenging power imbalances and cultural biases in the production of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, “decolonizing" these fields. By involving those studied in the process of research design, implementation, and analysis, participatory methods seek to empower research participants to shape research agendas according to their priorities. Such methods have been important to research on the human impacts of climate change. Building on this prior work, the papers in this symposium examine how collaborative documentation of climate and environment injustices can contribute to the articulation of solutions, adaptations, and visions of better worlds.

Paper 1 combines collaborative fiction-writing methods and participatory planning methods to facilitate a co-creative process in which fishworkers and farmers imagine distant futures for their livelihoods and identify opportunities to flourish. He asks how focusing on the imaginative work of frontline communities, rather than only their protests against present injustice, can expand our recognition of what a more environmentally just world might look like.

Paper 2 will discuss working alongside humanitarian aid workers and activists in migrant-serving organizations across Mexico to anticipate opportunities and risks associated with the growing salience of “climate refugee" discourse in transnational immigration politics.

Paper 3 employs moderate autoethnography a land parcel in Delaware County, Ohio to trace histories of colonization, dispossession, environmental degradation, and economic boom alongside the author's own experience of attachment and grief related to this place. The study provides an account of poor and working-class rural emplacement, increasing understanding of the haunting but disenfranchised grief of solastalgia, even for places not viewed as ecologically or aesthetically important.

Paper 4 examines the role of social work in addressing extreme weather disaster in the so-called "last remaining slum" neighborhood in Seoul, South Korea. He collaborated with social work agencies as well as local grassroots advocacy groups, examining their responses to extreme weather and critiquing them from an ecosocial work lens. Particularly, the example of his photovoice project with community members highlights the importance of power and agency among the people and emphasizes inclusivity in the pursuit of climate justice.