Learning about climate change can trigger debilitating cycles of eco-grief, despair, and apathy. So how can an educator work with those emotions and still get the lesson across?

In her upcoming talk, titled Coming of Age at the End of the World: Eco-Grief and the Climate Generation, Sarah Jaquette Ray explores the challenges of teaching depressing material about climate change and social injustice to college students. In response, she has devoted herself to making emotions central to the pedagogy.

Sarah Jaquette Ray works on environmental justice theory, intersections of identity, power, and place, and the environmental humanities. She has published on disability, immigration, motherhood, transnational environmental justice, and teaching environmental justice literature.

Her most recent book, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture, explores the ways in which the dominant US environmental movement, despite being progressive in many ways, often reinforces social hierarchies along lines of gender, class, race, and, particularly, bodily “ability.”

She leads the Environmental Studies BA program at HSU.