Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduate Marquetta L. Goodwine, Queen Quet of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, sang those lines from the spiritual “I’ve Been in the Storm Too Long” at the beginning of her presentation during an April 25 panel on environmental and climate justice. The event, held online, was sponsored by Fordham’s MOSAIC alumni affinity chapter and the Office of Alumni Relations. It featured alumni, faculty, and other experts who discussed how environmental and climate issues disproportionately affect certain populations—and how we can, both globally and locally, work toward lessening those impacts.

The lyrics Queen Quet sang also speak to the work she has been doing for more than two decades as chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, a sovereign people who live along the Atlantic coast from Pender County, North Carolina, to St. John’s County, Florida. On the low-lying land populated by the Gullah/Geechee, flooding has been a longstanding problem only heightened by the increasing number and severity of storms due to climate change.

As one of two keynote speakers, Queen Quet emphasized the importance of communicating about climate change in ways that are easily understandable to every community.

“It cannot be spoken of in terms of carbon emissions and CO2 and these types of things, because that is not everyday common vernacular throughout America,” Queen Quet said.

She also discussed some of the specific work the Gullah/Geechee Nation is doing to prepare for natural disasters caused by climate change, including building resiliency hubs to store supplies and solar power charging stations, which could also serve as an airdrop point for food and other necessities. And while her nation has already seen a great deal of damage from flooding and beach erosion, Queen Quet said that speaking at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in 2019 was an opportunity to share optimistic ideas with other leaders from around the world.

“We’re all trying to show each other living examples of what we’re doing where we are to make this world a better place, to try to heal it, try to reverse some of the impacts,” she said.

‘We Must Be Willing to Serve’

The second keynote speaker, Dr. Daniel Chidubem Gbujie, a climate activist, writer, and oral surgeon from Nigeria, seconded Queen Quet’s call for effectively communicating the risks of climate change to every community.

“Context matters,” he said. “The way you deliver your message is very important.”

Dr. Gbujie pointed to the ways that sub-Saharan Africa has already been devastated by climate change, from flooding in his native Nigeria to drought that has played a role in conflicts like the Sudanese Civil War, which in 2017 the U.N. World Food Program called “the first climate change conflict.”

As the founder of the Team 54 Project, a nonprofit organization with the goal of raising awareness about the impact of climate change and the need to take urgent global actions, Dr. Gbujie said that he has found inspiration in the mission of Jesuit education and the idea of cura personalis—care for the whole person—when thinking about how best to approach the climate crisis.

“For everything that we experience here,” he said, “there’s a level of empathy and sympathy we have to have. To resolve the climate crisis we have right now, we must be willing to serve. …

We must be willing to look for new, innovative ideas, and we must be willing to ensure that we have a moral compass that guides us when we negotiate.”

Along with the keynote speakers, the panel—which was moderated by Marion Bell, FCLC ’92, one of MOSAIC’s co-founders, with support from fellow chapter co-founders Felicia Gomes-Gregory, FCLC ’88, GSAS ’98,  and Marlene Taylor-Ponterotto, FCRH ’79—featured presentations from several speakers who discussed the infrastructural keys to adapting to and mitigating climate change, both at Fordham and beyond.

Using Infrastructure and Policy to Prepare for the Future

After opening the event with a prayer, Bell, who is also the chairperson for environmental and climate justice of the NAACP mid-Manhattan branch, introduced Marco Valera, vice president for administration at Fordham. Valera, who took on his current role in 2019 after serving as vice president for facilities management, discussed the work that has been done and will be done infrastructurally to reduce the University’s carbon emissions,—continuing to improve building insulation, for example, moving the University’s vehicle fleet to electric, and using available surface space for green roofs and solar panels, like those atop the Rose Hill regional parking garage.

The second speaker was Sameer Ranade, a climate justice adviser for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), a public-benefit corporation whose mission is to “advance clean energy innovation and investments to combat climate change, improving the health, resiliency, and prosperity of New Yorkers and delivering benefits equitably to all.” Ranade’s position at the authority was created as part of the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019—which was signed into law at the Fordham School of Law—and he provides support for both New York’s Climate Action Council and the Climate Justice Working Group.

Ranade presented some of the state’s energy and climate justice goals, which include reducing statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 60% of 1990 levels by 2030 and to 15% of 1990 levels by 2050.

“Clean energy can actually lower emissions in all sectors, but especially so in buildings, transportation, and electric power generation,” Ranade said, noting that moving to clean energy would also add 10 jobs for every one job displaced, according to a study by the state’s Just Transition Working Group. He also encouraged audience members to attend one of the Climate Action Council’s remaining public hearings to share input on the scoping plan for New York’s climate goals.

Fordham professor John Davenport, Ph.D., discussed another element of mitigating the effects of climate change that is particularly important to New York and other coastal communities: managing stormwater runoff. As the danger of strong storms and flooding continues to increase, Davenport said, it will be essential to use infrastructure like green roofs and street trees to absorb water and limit runoff, and to provide tax incentives to land and building owners for implementing methods of runoff reduction.

“It’s going to be important to start using the language of savings,” Bell said in response to Davenport’s presentation, touching on the same need for good communication highlighted by the keynote speakers. “What it will save us rather than how much it will cost us.”

But what happens when exclusion arises within those very groups?

A panel of Graduate School of Social Service professors grappled with that and other questions during a virtual event, Exclusion in Queer Spaces, that showed just how multilayered and complex it can be to create a more just and inclusive society.

Hosted by the Office of Alumni Relations, the Aug. 13 event grew out of concerns “that some members of the alumni community may have felt excluded from particular spaces, or alternatively, very included,” said Assistant Professor Sameena Azhar, Ph.D., one of five panelists who offered their views and took questions. Approximately 60 people attended, most of whom were alumni.

Layers of Exclusion

Panelists noted that exclusion can happen on many levels because queer people can have other intersecting identities—based on race, disability, or other traits and life experiences.

“Creating queer spaces [implies] this leaning towards inclusivity, but oftentimes people are still put in boxes within those boxes that they find themselves in,” said Assistant Professor Christopher Curtis, Ph.D. “And because things like privilege are so invisible, and we don’t see how we’re weaponizing that against people who check the same oppressed boxes we do, it is allowed to spread and grow and thrive.”

Another panelist, Associate Professor Laura Wernick, Ph.D., gave an example. One of her research projects, conducted at predominantly white universities in the Midwest, found that group activism helped white LGBTQ students cope with the depression brought on by discrimination.

The story was different, however, for LGBTQ students of color in these groups: Their depression grew worse. “Among students of color in these predominantly white organizations … the marginalization becomes strengthened,” Wernick said in a follow-up interview. Implicit and explicit racial bias exists within many LGBTQ organizations “culturally and politically grounded in [w]hiteness,” notes the 2016 study co-authored by Wernick and published in the Journal of Homosexuality.

The study raises interesting questions about what it means to be a queer organization and the conditions under which it becomes exclusionary, Wernick said.

One solution is having groups on campus for students with multiple identities. “Queer and trans folks of color don’t even have to be participating in it to benefit from it. Knowing it’s there is huge,” she said in the follow-up interview, noting the possibilities for collaboration among such groups on campus to foster greater understanding.

Wernick added that new faculty member Derek Tice-Brown, Ph.D., has taken the lead in forming affinity groups around race, and possibly gender and sexuality, at the Graduate School of Social Service for the coming year.

Queer Spaces and Social Constructs

The talk moved beyond groups and organizations to larger concepts of queer space. Panelist Tina Maschi, Ph.D., an associate professor, defined it as “not just a simple physical type of place, but this field of possibilities”—including genderqueer, gender fluid, and other identities—that allows for a certain amount of artistry.

“I consider myself all of the above plus more,” said Maschi, who uses the pronoun shea+ to indicate that identity. “All of these multiple realities coexist. And that’s queer space for me, and I’m happy to be sharing it with everybody.”

Maschi also noted another form of exclusion. In her own work with LGBTQ elders coming out of prison, shea+ said, “What concerned me the most was they were excluded from the dialogue about [queer] people.” There was also little research on it, which shea+ and her colleagues worked to rectify, Maschi said.

Wernick added that ableism, or discrimination in favor of the able-bodied, “is pervasive in more mainstream queer spaces,” just as it is in many spaces, although other queer communities have taken the lead in emphasizing accessibility, she said.

In fact, groups organized around ability and groups organized around gender and sexuality have common experiences, like “being seen socially or structurally as sick, or as needing to be fixed,” said Assistant Professor Kimberly Hudson, Ph.D.

An answer to that view is the social model of disability or ability, in which disability is viewed as a societal construct rather than a medical condition. This model can be applied to gender and sexuality as well, Hudson said.

“That really counters these deficit-based models of thinking about these experiences,” Hudson said. “It shifts the focus away from people’s bodies or people’s behaviors or identities and really focuses on systems and structures as being what is sick, and what is needing to be fixed.”

Azhar noted the perversity of a diagnosis being required before people can receive services related to gender identity.

“By giving this diagnosis, I can create a pathway for people to be able to access hormones or gender reassignment surgery or other kinds of benefits that they may otherwise not be able to receive,” she said. “It’s a real Catch-22 for clinical social workers, where you know that in order to give folks a pathway to access, you may be reifying a construct that you don’t believe in.”

Toward Greater Inclusion

In response to a question about how best to limit exclusionary behavior, Curtis replied, “Conversations like this. That’s how we start.”

“We have to keep this conversation open. We have to keep the conversation moving,” and accept that our own experiences and perceptions are not universal, he said.

“We don’t even see ourselves as being wrong or judgmental or discriminatory, because we assume that everybody functions the way that we do and thinks about things the way that we do,” he said. “So we have to be willing to unlearn many of the bad habits that we’ve picked up in personal and professional spaces.”

“There has to be a willingness to be uncomfortable,” he said. “We have to be ready to have those uncomfortable conversations and be wrong and not know and be confused. That’s how we learn.”

Read more about the panelists, their research, and their projects at Fordham and in the community.