Biography
Rocky Douglas (she/her) is a plant-loving multimedia artist and future master herbalist with roots in Houston, Texas. She's currently a Sociology Ph.D. student at Brown University. Her work is attentive to Black folks' relationships to nature and how these relationships shape their political and social praxes. Her thesis, "Trauma is Carried in the Spirit: The Praxis, Pedagogy, and Freedom Dreams of Black Women's Healing Faith Practices," seeks to honor Black women and femmes as theorists in their own right and to critically co-create theological frameworks with them.
Paper Abstract
In Elliot (2018)'s groundbreaking essay, she proposed a "sociology of loss" that engages what is, will, or must disappear as climate change progresses. She proposes this as a way to communicate the "stakes and consequences" of ecological destruction. I use her framework to engage the forms of loss that have characterized Black people's fraught relationships with land in America, including attempted dehumanization and constant cycles of migration and/or forceful displacement. These are important processes to think about because they are intertwined with the colonial and capitalistic structures that fuel climate change. Furthermore, the residual and ongoing grief created by these losses shape people's ideals and practices with ecological worlds, often creating generative spaces for imagination, lamentation, and forms of resistance that are well-documented in Black ecologies, but largely understudied by environmental sociology. Following a Du Boisian methodology that treats lived experience as fruitful grounds for theorizing, I analyze the forms of loss and responses to loss present in U.S. Black American's experiences with land. In order to do that, I synthesize i) my own family's history with displacement, land, and "black commons" ii) interviews I conducted with spiritual practitioners in New York City on Black people's relationships to nature and iii) scholarship on Black ecologies. These different sources help me theorize Black Landways as the matrix of strategies that Black folks use to negotiate, navigate, and resist the conceptualization of land and relationships to land in racialized modernity as well as the processes that emerge from our engagement with land. As an emerging theoretical framework, Black Landways helps us understand what Black folks have lost, what needs to be lost as we rewrite our relationships with lands, and how people are losing themselves in creating and imagining other worlds.