Environmental Racism is Garbage

The symposium is now over. It was wonderful! Congratulations to all the amazing contributors and thanks to all our partners. Inquiries? Please email us at info@environmentalracismisgarbage.ca

2021 Keynote Speakers:
Winona LaDuke & Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory

^{Photo by David Kilabuk}

Welcome to
Environmental Racism is Garbage

The aim of this interactive virtual research-creation and art symposium is to bear modest witness to waste as a symptom of environmental racism. At least one billion people live in over a quarter of a million slums worldwide, often with no formal waste or sanitation infrastructure or services (Davis 2007). And in economically affluent countries, landfills and other waste management systems are most often sited in or close to poor or racialized communities (for example, Amegah and Jaakkola 2016; Furedy 1993; Mothiba, Moja and Loans 2017; Parizeau 2006) who bear disproportionate burden of persistent exposure to the risks, hazards and contamination pollution (Hird in press; Hird and Zahara 2016).

Environmental Racism is Garbage seeks knowledge production and acts of resistance at the intersection of art, politics, and the relationship between racialized injustice and ecological crisis. We’ve invited contributions and collaborations from visual and performance-based artists, curators, theorists and activists, to create submissions that engage with the interconnections between environmental health, socio-economic conditions, racialized discrimination, social justice – with transdisciplinary work driven by creative inquiry and lived experience forefronted.