G1: The Praxis of Care in an Age of Crises

While recognizing Cox’s argument that environmental communication is a crisis discipline, panelists will develop Pezzullo’s argument that environmental communication dialectically is a care discipline. They will do so with attention to a range of epistemological and theoretical perspectives on care, methodological considerations about the care work of research, and everyday practices and ecologies of care with/in our communities.

Before opening the floor for discussion, roundtable participants will engage this topic in two ways. First, they will theorize care work as praxis in contexts of uneven vulnerabilities, informed by decolonial, intersectional feminist, queer, critical race, anticapitalist, and disability justice perspectives. Second, each will discuss multimodal practices derived from panelists’ environmental communication fieldwork, pedagogy, and community organizing. Panelists’ grounded examples that amplify and co-create practices of care work, include: (1) #StopFormosaPlastic transnational solidarity through hashtag activism, (2) disability justice at the Johnson County Poor Farm in Iowa, US; (3) anti-colonial energy justice collaborations among Puerto Ricans in the US diaspora and in Puerto Rico; (4) food justice and informal mutual aid organizing in the Bay Area, California, US, (5) sense-making discourses of Black men in environmental advocacy in the Midwestern US; & (6) organizing against toxics on the Mexico/US Fronteras. It is hoped that learning about this range of underheard voices will foster a meaningful discussion about what an ethics of care entails for practitioners, researchers, and teachers in environmental communication praxis.