ABSTRACT
I must confess that I haven’t taught climate change in my classroom, at least not explicitly. The primary reason I haven’t taught it is because the context and field in which I teach and research is American Studies, and within American Studies, environmental justice. Climate change has not been a core topic in American Studies. Although my primary research area is environmental justice activism, dominant scholarship on climate change has not explicitly focused on race and class. Thus, my chapter is focused on how I have taught exploratory concepts, case studies, and keywords to a generalist undergraduate audience (and particularly first year students, from across the disciplinary spectrum) as a way of indirectly teaching environmental justice and climate change. The primary concepts I teach are ideology, hegemony, and as a particular example,
neoliberalism. Second, I teach through the case study of Hurricane Katrina. The last part of this essay is, at this point, purely tentative, in which I discuss how I will teach climate justice in the future. In this speculative section, I examine how to teach through a keyword: scale, with a particular case study of an Arctic Native community named Kivalina that is facing imminent relocation from flooding related to climate change.
