Water Futures: Black Relations with Water as Knowledge in Southeast North Carolina

Maya Revell

Amid uncertain climate futures, this dissertation explores how situated Black relations to water and place in Southeastern North Carolina offer vital, yet overlooked, knowledge for reimagining environmental, climate, and science education. Grounded in Black Ecologies, environmental education, and speculative pedagogies, this study contends that global antiblackness and enduring structures of slavery have disproportionately exposed Black communities to environmental harm. Simultaneously, Black communities have cultivated intimate, resistant, and creative relationships with the more-than-human world. Drawing on intergenerational stories of Black maritime labor; beach and swampland narratives; and, accounts of climate displacement and environmental organizing, this research investigates how Black onto-epistemologies can restory place and inform educational practices. The project engages educators and youth in interactive mapping and focus groups that center Black environmental relations, asking: (1) How can engaging with situated Black relations to changing waterscapes inform teacher practice and/or curriculum development? (2) How can these relations help teachers and students imagine and work toward desirable futures? (3) What conditions are required to realize these futures?

About Maya Revell

Maya Revell is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Studies with a focal concentration in Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education at the University of Oregon. Her research centers the conceptual framework of Black Ecologies in environmental and place-based education. In her dissertation, Maya is exploring how Black relations with the waterscape serve as necessary knowledge for restorying place and imagining more desirable futures. Maya has a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and a Master of Arts in Sustainability from Wake Forest University. She has worked as a Graduate Assistant with the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice, participated as a 2022 Fellow with the Yale Environmental Fellows Program, and was a 2023 Fellow in George Mason University's Institute for Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Methodologies. Maya has shared her work at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE), The Black Women's Studies Association Conference, and the Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism (CIARS) Decolonizing Conference.