Everybody’s Getting Involved: SEJ Initiatives Across Disciplines New Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative Spans Across Disciplines
New sustainability and environmental justice initiative
As the new year begins, Reed is launching its new Sustainability and Environmental Justice (SEJ) initiative, a program facilitating collaboration between faculty and students who want Reed to be a more environmentally conscious institution. The SEJ initiative connects academic, co-curricular, and residential programming at Reed with the goal of building community across disciplines and perspectives.
Although the field of environmental studies is often framed through a scientific lens, vital work is being done on this subject across academic disciplines, including in the humanities and arts, and the SEJ initiative strives to empower students in their study of environmental justice regardless of their academic focus.
The new Environmental Humanities initiative at Reed College fosters innovative curriculum, vital scholarship, and collaborative approaches to ecological crisis and the cultural imagination. Expanding Reed’s curricular offerings across humanistic disciplines, Environmental Humanities (EH) connects diverse fields of study to urgent, complex questions of social and environmental justice, both in and beyond the classroom.
Over the last two summers, fourteen professors have participated in the Mellon Environmental Humanities Incubator, developing syllabi for courses around shared questions about place, multispecies entanglement, and environmental justice in a range of academic disciplines including art and art history, literature, political science, religion, music, history, and anthropology. You can find out more about participating faculty and their EH courses on the Mellon EH website. Meanwhile, the Sustainability interns have been revitalizing their own programs in our community such as the Garden/Orchard, Swap Shop, the Recycling Center, and the Reed Community Pantry.
The Garden Stewards this year are Maggie Miklas ‘25 and Ashley Schlipp ‘25, who are working to keep both the garden and orchard maintained. Produce grown on campus is delivered regularly to the Reed Community Pantry, located in GCC 042. The Swap Shop is run by Emily Howley, and a new mural will soon decorate the outside walls. The Recycling Center is managed by Rachel Thacker, so visit the recycling center, located on the bottom floor of the GCC, for any recycling needs you might have.
The idea for the SEJ pilot came out of Reed’s newest living-learning community at Garden House, where residents have the opportunity to put sustainability into practice. Megan Simón and others in Residential Life started working with Sustainability and EH last year, planning a new model for learning grounded in connections between curricular, co-curricular, and residential education. The emphasis on environmental justice in addition to sustainability (the EJ of SEJ) encourages students to think critically about what we are sustaining and for whom through a range of programs and events; keep an eye out for these opportunities to get involved (the SEJ website is coming soon)! Living on-site in Garden House, our first SEJ Scholar Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey ‘24 will support experiential learning beyond the classroom in a pilot modeled on the Language Scholars Program. Esmé is available to speak to any students hoping to learn more about this initiative or environmental justice more broadly.
Keep an eye out for ways to get involved with SEJ at Reed, and shoot Esmé an email (esmekaplankinsey@reed.edu) if you’d like to be added to the SEJ newsletter!Also reach out to Megan Simón (simonmeg@reed.edu), Sarah Wagner-McCoy (smccoy@reed.edu), and Rachel Willis (willisr@reed.edu) for any potential future collaborations!