Braiding Climate Stories:

Grappling with Land, Environment, and Climate (In)justices through Feminist Anti-colonial Pedagogy

 

Meera Karunananthan and Richa Nagar

This article is a part of AGITATE! Vol 6 (2026): Pedagogy of Hope

 

Introduction

Climate change is a defining force for many university and college students in Canada and the United States. It shapes their political consciousness, social relations, and dreams for the future. Yet dominant media and social media narratives often obscure the structural drivers of socio-environmental degradation and the unequal distribution of its impacts. By ignoring the ways that climate change interacts with colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchy, these depoliticized climate discourses marginalize the voices, experiences, and epistemologies of those who are most deeply affected. In Fall 2024, three of us—Meera Karunananthan (Carleton University), Richa Nagar (Smith College), and Sirisha Naidu (University of Missouri-Kansas City)—came together to co-create a shared course module aimed at cultivating a feminist, anti-colonial reading of dominant ideas and policy debates regarding environment and climate change. Here, we share some reflections and glimpses of our cross-institutional and transnational feminist pedagogical collaboration.

Building on our own experiences of working within frontline communities and social movements, we strived to co-develop a curriculum module across our diverse institutional locations and contexts with a vision to foster critical thinking, self-reflexivity, and solidarity in the classroom. We did this by weaving together the works of Indigenous scholars, Black and Brown feminist thinkers, political ecologists, and frontline community organizers. We challenged the dominance of Eurocentric epistemologies in climate education while also offering students creative tools to critically interrogate (a) the politics of environmental discourse, governance, and resistance; and (b) the ways in which we ourselves are embedded or implicated in these politics.

The curriculum module was piloted in March 2025 through our respective courses: two sections of Richa’s “Introduction to the Study of Gender, Women and Sexuality” at Smith College (USA), and Meera’s third-year course, “Climate Justice and Action,” in Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University (Canada). Over a period of three to four weeks, students at Smith and Carleton engaged with a curated set of readings (see Appendix), classroom discussions, and participatory assignments. They were invited to consider the ways in which class, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and the political relations between global North and South interact to produce differentiated socio-environmental conditions. Given scheduling constraints, we incorporated pre-recorded conversations among us (Meera, Richa, Sirisha) regarding the materials that we covered in our lectures. We also pre-recorded a conversation with Ana Isla, a sociologist from Brock University, whose groundbreaking research exposes the devastating socio-environmental impacts of the Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature swap (Isla, 2011) and which we included in our reading list. Through these dialogic pedagogical tools, we aimed to model critical engagement across positionalities, disciplines, and geopolitical contexts, while encouraging spaces for individual and collective critical reflection on the readings and themes. The final assignment invited students to articulate their understandings of climate (in)justices through storytelling, with a focus on situated, relational, and community-based knowledges. Selected stories were published on a shared Instagram page managed by Rachel Woods (former MA student at Carleton), Guy Brodsky (a teaching assistant at Carleton), and Maya Martinez Dias and Ariel Tourmaline (pedagogical partners at Smith). Ariel, Guy, and Maya reflected on the students’ journeys and creative labors with this assignment in a short podcast.

Below we share key highlights of the pedagogical frameworks, methods, and possibilities that emerged through this collaboration. Situating our work within feminist and anti-colonial critiques of climate pedagogy, and placing it within the socio-geographic and institutional contexts of our respective classrooms, we highlight the main elements of our content and approach, and the manner in which students’ shared reflection and its translation into digital storytelling constituted a critical praxis. We hope that the reflections shared here will inspire ongoing conversations and explorations of challenges and possibilities of climate justice education through cross-institutional feminist pedagogical collaborations.

A Feminist Anti-colonial Approach to Climate Education

There is a growing recognition that effective climate action requires sensitive storytelling that connects abstract data with concrete everyday realities (Mishra and Vasudevan, 2024). As Rebecca Solnit (2023, par. 3) argues, “In order to do what the climate crisis demands of us, we have to find stories of a livable future, stories of popular power, stories that motivate people to do what it takes to make the world we need.” Moreover, in a context of information overload with competing narratives and vast sources of misinformation, feminist educators must equip our students with the tools to parse and critically engage knowledge by developing a deeper analysis of systems of power. Following these commitments, our storytelling assignment challenged students to bridge systemic critiques with situated experiences. As Donna Haraway (1988, p. 590) reminds us, “The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.” Our classroom assignments and activities supported students as they learned to situate the contexts in which knowledge is produced even as they analyzed texts that encompassed everything—from global policies, financial institutions, and measures of development, to Indigenous visions of climate and social justice, feminist critiques, and multi-scalar alliances for community-led strategies for justice. 

For their final assignment, students were guided to use storytelling to explore the intersections of climate change, capitalism, and systems of oppression, while considering how alternative visions for the future could be realized within their own communities. Working in pairs or small groups, students created stories that linked personal and intimate relationships to, and experiences of, climate change to systemic issues that are often erroneously perceived as far removed from us. The assignment proceeded through three phases.

PHASE I: Class Discussions and Collaborative Learning Exercises 

For each text in our shared curriculum, we facilitated classroom discussions and activities guiding students through individual and collective reflections that carefully examined four dimensions:

1. Key issues: What are the injustice/s addressed in the reading or audio-visual content? How is the problem presented? 
2. Critiques: What are the critiques put forward in the assigned material? How are the authors positioned in relation to the injustices/problems identified?
3. Connections: How do the critiques offered in the assigned text connect with the student’s lived experiences or observations from their location/situation?
4. Alternative visions: What alternative vision to present-day political economy is offered in the reading or video? How would students implement this vision in their communities? How do we define our community (e.g. campus community, neighbourhoods, cultural community)? What challenges do we foresee in building alternatives within these communities, and how can they be addressed? 

PHASE II: Preparation and Submission of Digital Stories

Working in pairs or groups of three, students drew on course materials and class exercises to craft a story bridging personal experiences associated with climate change with a broader systemic problem. In each story, they were asked to incorporate:  

• A situated critique: Students were asked to develop a critique that applied key concepts from course materials to their own contexts drawing from lived experiences, personal observations and locations/situations. Students also grappled with two specific questions: What is the “public narrative” we wish to build from our personal experiences? How is our desired audience impacted by or implicated in this story?

• An alternative vision or action: What alternative vision does the story propose, and how do we seek to implement this vision in our community? How do we seek to engage our audience? What action would we ask our audience to take? 

In Richa’s class, students drafted 200-300 word proposals summarizing key elements of their story and details regarding the presentation and format of their assignment. In Meera’s class, students were guided to create storyboards or visual outlines offering a brief overview of the storyline and a rough sketch of the sequence of images to be presented in the final story. In both classes, students were asked to prepare stories that may eventually be posted to a joint Instagram account in the form of short videos, slides, captioned images, or infographics. 

PHASE III: Sharing, Feedback, and Finalizing the Story 

Students shared drafts of their stories in the classroom to receive feedback from peers and instructors. This multi-step, collaborative process enabled authors to test ideas and refine content before finalizing the assignment. In their final assignments, students were asked to prioritize the following elements:

1. Engagement / Accuracy: Does the story accurately and thoughtfully reflect the issue? Are the critique and alternative vision well-represented?  
2. Clarity and coherence: Is the content presented in a way that is clear and understandable to a broad audience? Does it avoid jargon while still being critical and insightful?
3. Creativity: Is the post original and visually engaging? Are the chosen format and visuals appropriate and effective in enhancing the story’s impact?
4. Critical analysis: Does the story shed light on the way processes of climate change interact with capitalism and other systems of oppression? Does it make meaningful connections between personal experience, course themes, and broader socio-political contexts?

In what follows, we offer some pedagogical notes and reflections. These notes are not intended to be “conclusions;” rather, we invite our readers to build connections with your observations and stories about the risks or explorations that you may have embraced in your own pedagogical journeys. Our hope is to continue to deepen shared hungers for justice by reshaping our classrooms into places that birth and nourish collective dreams as well as visions and strategies for transformative action. 

Notes and Reflections

Our collaboration unfolded across two distinct institutional and socio-geographic contexts: Smith College is a private liberal arts women’s college located in Northampton, Massachusetts (occupied Nonotuck land). Carleton University is a mid-sized public research university in Ottawa, Canada (unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory). Our shared curriculum was part of Meera’s third-year course in Environmental Studies at Carleton University and Richa’s first-year introduction to the study of women, gender, and sexuality at Smith College. At the outset, we were curious about how cultural, institutional, and demographic differences might play out in students’ varied responses to our shared curriculum. 

Specifically, while students generally embrace participatory learning opportunities, Meera had also previously encountered challenges from students favouring a more straightforward path to meeting course requirements. Unlike the students in many private colleges in the U.S., the students in her courses at Carleton live off campus. A significant number of them live with their families and commute to campus from suburbs where access to public transit is unreliable and inadequate. Many work part-time jobs to help pay school fees and living expenses. Even with a workload that is consistent with departmental norms, a collaborative pedagogical approach requires students to show up to class prepared to contribute meaningfully. Our approach also pushes students beyond familiar academic routines, asking them to take interpersonal and intellectual risks.  

In each of our classrooms we adapted various collaborative and participatory methodologies learned in social movement and community organizing contexts. Building on her ongoing and collective labors to advance feminist decolonial praxis (e.g. Nagar, 2014), Richa guided her students to learn from one another in a mode that complicated the relationships between self and that which has been systematically othered. In Meera’s class, students took turns as pedagogical co-creators by contributing supplementary content and leading classroom discussions. We both emphasized peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing activities that pushed students to deepen their engagement with the material and create stories where they could insert themselves intimately and relationally with/in processes that they had often encountered as far removed from them.

Many of these pedagogical tools have been long created and nourished by grassroots movements of working class and oppressed people who have recognized popular education as means of emancipation (see for example: Freire, 2000; hooks, 1994). At the same time, undergraduate students dealing with significant time constraints and financial stresses may not always be in a place to embrace the opportunity to engage as co-creators in the classroom. 

Meanwhile, Gen Z popular culture is saturated with life hacking strategies aimed at optimizing resources and extracting the most value for the least effort. Artificial Intelligence has amplified this neoliberal logic, giving students quick fixes and instant outputs that enable them to short-circuit even the traditional academic learning methods which they are accustomed to in a university setting.

The arduous and messy processes we propose can feel counterintuitive and even burdensome within this broader cultural and material context. Our pedagogical approach deliberately disrupts these tendencies by fostering collective meaning-making and by challenging students to seek and seed visions of solidarity with communities outside the classroom. Against traditional and emerging forms of extractivist, individualist knowledge production, we emphasize lived experience, embodied learning, and collective inquiry that resists careerist individualism and saviorism.   

At the same time, we continued to push our own boundaries by working with a social media platform with which our students were far more comfortable than we were. In doing so, we gave students the opportunity to imagine and create public-facing outputs that would feed conversations in both academic and non-academic spaces. It also enabled students to break free from the constraints of conventional academic writing, which for some can feel restrictive, intimidating, and disconnected from their everyday lives and modes of conversation and connection with the ‘everyday.’ 

The social media–based project enabled students to engage audiences beyond the classroom, positioning them as active participants in policy debates, critical media analysis, and popular education around climate change and environmental justice. In one project, Smith students Ava Rosoff, Eliza McClelland, and Yujie Gong contrast the limited coverage of the loss of 1,700 lives in the 2022 Pakistan floods with the extensive and detailed coverage of 29 deaths in the LA wildfires. They ask: “Who deserves humanity and sympathy?” Engaging the issue from their situated perspective as students in the U.S., they invite their peers to consider how they and their government are implicated in socio-natural disasters unfolding far away. 

Cree student Haylee Petawabano explores similar questions from an Indigenous standpoint. Her project with fellow Carleton University student Emma Reid challenges dominant media accounts of the 2023 wildfires for focusing disproportionately on air quality in New York City and other major urban centres, while erasing the devastating material, cultural, and territorial losses experienced by Cree families in Haylee’s community of Eeyou Istchee in northern Quebec.

We also respected the wishes of students who were uncomfortable sharing their work publicly. In particular, one Carleton student in the process of applying for permanent residency in Canada, feared that critiques of Canadian policy in their assignment would be held against them. Their vulnerability underscored the real risks some students face when navigating boundaries between the classroom and the public sphere. This student’s experience reminds us that collaborative, community-engaged pedagogy must always be grounded in consent, care, and contextual awareness. 

Through this work, we have sought to build responsible relationships with ongoing grassroots struggles for justice, one where ‘climate’ is not isolated from our own everyday lives, aspirations, knowledges, and dreams. In seeking to dismantle barriers between the classroom and the community, we strive to create opportunities for students to embrace their journeys as continuous learners—not just of (or from) academic and other formally recognized texts, but also from lived experience and collective co-creation and action that are often undervalued or entirely dismissed in many academic settings. 

 

References

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.; M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1970)

Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Nagar, R. (2014). Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism. University of Illinois Press.

Solnit, R. (2023). “It’s not too late: changing the climate story from despair to hope.” The Guardian, April 18, 2023.

 

Appendix 

Learning to Read through the Lenses of Feminist Anti-colonial Engagements with Land, Environment, & Climate (In)justices: A Shared Curricular Module.

Session 1

• Waring, M. (1995). Who’s Counting? Sex, Lies, & Global Economics [Film]. Turner, T. (Director). National Film Board of Canada.  https://www.nfb.ca/film/whos_counting/ 
• Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network. (2016). Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies. http://landbodydefense.org/uploads/files/VLVBReportToolkit2016.pdf
•  Moore, J. & Patel, R. (2018, May 8). How the Chicken Nugget became the True Symbol of Our Era. The Guardian.

Session 2

• Isla, A. (2009). “Who Pays for the Kyoto Protocol? Selling Oxygen and Selling Sex in Costa Rica.” In Salleh, A. (Ed.) Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology. Pluto Press. https://www.academia.edu/23151616/Who_Pays_for_the_Kyoto_Protocol_Selling_Oxygen_and_Selling_Sex_in_Costa_Rica
• Naidu, S.C. (2021). Conservation as Economic Imperialism. In Ness, I., Cope, Z. (Eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi-org.libproxy.smith.edu/10.1007/978-3-030-29901-9_199

Session 3

• War on Want (2021, May 12). From Crisis to Justice Part I: How do we win a Global Green Deal. [Webinar recording].
• The Red Deal: Extended Interview with Red Nation Members About an Indigenous Plan to Save Our Earth. 
• Goodman, A. (Host). (2021, April 22). The Red Deal: Extended interview with Red Nation members about an Indigenous plan to save our Earth [Video]. Democracy Now!. https://www.democracynow.org/2021/4/22/the_red_deal_extended_interview_wit
• Dearing, A.  (2023). Cochabamba People’s Agreement: Annotated. Jstor Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/cochabamba-peoples-agreement-annotated/