Black Feminist Environmental Ethnographer/ 2019
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I am the great-granddaughter of field hands who toiled in tobacco and cotton fields in North Carolina, factory workers who migrated to New Jersey during the Great Migration and former sharecroppers whose descendants still live in Georgia. I am a descendant of enslaved Africans, Indigenous folk, plantation owners and immigrants from various countries. I come from a family of strong, powerful, resourceful, creative and outrageous women who break rules, defy stereotypes, strategically navigate white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and raise hell/create spectacles when insulted and/or angered.
I am also a Black woman and woman of color who grew up in Section 8 housing and homeless shelters in Arlington, Virginia. I am a proud graduate of Spelman College and first-generation Ph.D. Candidate in Society & Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Most importantly, I am a feminist anthropologist, human geographer and environmental sociologist i.e. I am an interdisciplinary social scientist, STEMinist, planner and ecowomanist ethnographer. My life work is shaped by environmental justice geographies including Carolina hog and chicken farms, Jersey urban landscapes and Louisiana petrochemical-plantation corridors. I currently, live, teach and dance on Indigenous land known as Bulbancha (i.e. New Orleans, Louisiana) that is historically home to the Chitimacha, Choctaw, Houma, Atakapa-Ishak and various other African and Creole Indigenous people(s). My life work is also shaped by my love for dance, Black futurity, art, feminist videography, spirit, community, brujeria, culture, travel, science, and vegan foodscapes. 
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Dr. Fatemeh Shafiei, Robin Roberts and Frances Roberts-Grregory at the 2017 People's Climate March in Washington, D.C.
2019 Skull & Bones Gang on Mardi Gras morning
in Tremé, New Orleans I AM A.....
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(Vegan) Ecowomanist Praxis
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An ecowomanist is a Black Afrofuturist environmental feminist. Ecowomanism refers to a Black feminist cosmological praxis (spirituality + theory + science + action) that centers embodied, experiential knowledge as well as collective memory, queerness, brujeria and experimentation to bring about community healing, justice, survival, pleasure, decolonization and liberation. Ecowomanists embrace the feminist principle that the personal is political and the political is personal. Ecowomanists take an intersectional and political ecological approach to identifying the root causes of environmental racism, gender inequality, femmephobia, antiblackness, emotional trauma and extractive racial capitalism. Ecowomanists believe that the future is femme, queer, emergent, heterogeneous and posthuman; and that communities on the margins of epistemological authority in post-apocalyptic geographies have solutions for inter-species, inter-generational and intra-generational justice. Ecowomanists draw inspiration from Alice Walker, Shamara Shantu Riley, Melanie Harris, Audre Lorde, Layli Maparyan, adrienne marie brown, Delores S. Williams, Carolyn Finney, Dorecta Taylor, Carolyn Merchant, Carol J. Adams, Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, Stacy M. Floyd Thomas, Ruthie Gilmore, Elaine Enarson, Jacqueline Patterson, Greta Gaard, Winona LaDuke, Lois Gibbs, Rachel Carson, Wangai Maathai, Vandana Shiva, Joy Degruy, Beverly Wright, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Majora Carter, bell hooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Oprah Winfry and countless unnamed mothers, aunties and grandmothers.
A Sistah Vegan, according to Dr. A. Breeze Harper, is a Black female vegan. Sistah Vegans actively strive to decolonize the body, mind and plate via a plant-based lifestyle, informed consumerism and political activism. I am personally inspired by the nutritional and vegan activism of Tracye Lynn McQuirter, Bryant Terry, Karyn Calabrese, Aph Ko, Dick Gregory, Catriona Rueda Esquibel, Nerissa Nefeteri, Erykah Badu and my mother Robin Roberts. 
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“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.” – June Jordan |
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Get In Touch
I look forward to connecting with you! Please contact me if you are interested in opportunities for collaboration and consulting.