Richmond Toxic Tours

Project Director: Kai Bosworth

The environmental justice movement in the US south first piloted “toxic tours” as a method of showing politicians and outsiders the noxious conditions in which they lived and worked. As an alternative method of history storytelling, toxic tours combine science, public history, and political organizing in order to create stronger ties to the places we inhabit, and the diverse communities therein. For human geographers and political ecologists, toxic tours further demonstrate that regular people are themselves expert creators of knowledge concerning urban environmental history, and of political diagnoses of the structural causes of such inequality. Along with students who take INTL 325 Nature Culture Justice, we are piloting diverse ways of documenting Richmond’s environmental histories and presents, including through zines, web materials, and in-person toxic tours. For more information, contact Kai Bosworth at bosworthk@vcu.edu. 

University Sustainability

Project Directors: Jesse Goldstein and Kai Bosworth, with student researcher Caroline May

Institutions of higher education position themselves as progressive leaders on questions of sustainability. But to what extent are they really making meaningful ecological changes to campus life, ending dirty research practices, and supporting more just relationships with surrounding communities? This project examines how universities (including VCU) narrate their ecological actions (or lack thereof). By examining voluntary, self-reported data from the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS), we investigate the progress and limits of current university sustainability practices. This project is convened by Jesse Goldstein and Kai Bosworth, with student researcher Caroline May.

Loose Parts

Project Director: Corin Hewitt

This VA Humanities funded project explores outdoor adventure play through a series of community conversations and pop-up adventure play experiences. Through documentation of these play-events and accompanying workshops, the team is creating short videos about adventure play. Three play actions took place in 2023: “The Fountain” at Patrick Henry Elementary, “The Crater” at Blue Sky Fund, and “Small Fires” at Lois Harrison-Jones Elementary. Each play-action is carefully designed in collaboration with our community hosts and supervised by trained playworkers who are working with Hewitt as part of his VIP lab, “Being Material.” While the typical adventure playground has four essential components (a vacant lot, “junk” and materials, kids, and adult/teen playworkers), our approach overlays a fifth element: the work of contemporary artists. In our playspaces, children will respond to, ignore, deface, build on, or destroy a set of rotating "provocations" created specifically for each play-action. Each of our events provides a space for parents, teachers and the broader community to engage with project team members as well as visiting adventure play experts in facilitated dialog about childhood, creativity and play. If you're interested in this project, or the VIP lab, please reach out to Corin Hewitt at chewitt@vcu.edu.

Reparative Land Justice Initiative

Project Directors: Duron Chavis, Meghan Gough, Susan Bodnar-Deren and Jesse Goldstein

This community-driven research focuses on questions around Black Food Sovereignty in Richmond, and community wealth building at minority led urban agriculture sites. For generations, farming has been used by Black people to build self-determined communities and to resist oppressive structures. Working in collaboration with community research partner Duron Chavis, founder of Happily Natural Day and a leading figure in Black food justice, this project asks, what grows in Black-led urban agricultural spaces, beyond food? This project includes a growing team of community co-researchers, as well as VCU professors Rohan Kalyan and John Jones. The project begins with storytelling interviews, and will evolve into a broader effort to build a community-values profile and counter-mapping meant to support Black-led urban agriculture spaces and to establish their centrality to both environmental and climate justice infrastructure. Students can work on this project through a VIP lab hosted in the department of Sociology. For inquiries, please contact Meghan Gough at mzgough@vcu.edu.

The John R. Lewis Memorial Lecture Series

In 2022, the Reparative Land Justice Initiative and the HRC helped facilitate the launch of a lecture series honoring the late John R. Lewis. John was a co-founder of Renew Richmond and a central figure supporting black urban agriculture in Richmond and beyond. Led by a community advisory committee, the series will host a leading figure in black urban agriculture for a public lecture and community workshop each year. Our inaugural lecturer was Malik Yakini, who presented “Growing Kale, Shifting Power and Building Food Sovereignty” on February 21, 2023. We look forward to a second event this coming Spring term. Inquiries can be directed to Jesse Goldstein at jgoldstein2@vcu.edu.