48-699 Environmental Justice and Decolonial Ecologies

9 units, Carnegie Mellon University

This course will examine the making — and unmaking — of spatial and ecological violence; at the plantation, the prison, the colony, the camp, the suburb, the factory, the forest, the dam, and more. While the universalizing concept of the Anthropocene has become a convenient shorthand to understand agency in the age of changing climates, it elides the central role of systems of racial capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy in the destruction of human and more-than-human lifeworlds, and erases other temporalities of disaster and survival. In this course, we will engage critical concepts from environmental justice, Black geographies, indigenous studies, urban political ecology, and architecture history to interrogate these processes, and to orient us away from rubrics of value, development, or sustainability, towards non-extractive futures and decolonial horizons. This graduate-level course is designed to create a community of learning through close reading and discussion. I welcome all students (undergraduate or graduate, architecture or non-architecture) with interest and engagement in these issues.

Prerequisites: none listed

Offered: Fall 2026, Fall 2025

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