Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute
The Black & Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute (BIFFI) strives to promote interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and cultural production that elevates intersectional feminist Black and Indigenous Studies. BIFFI achieves these aims through a “Fellows-in-Residence” program that hosts elders, artists, scholars, organizers, and practitioners at UVA; Summer Institutes that offer intensive instruction in intersectional feminist Black and Indigenous theories, methods, curricular design, pedagogies, and community building work; and by establishing the first “Black and Indigenous Studies Certificate Program” in the US South. →Website
Coastal Futures Conservatory
The Coastal Futures Conservatory integrates arts and humanities into the investigation of coastal change. Working with scientists at the Virginia Coastal Reserve, an NSF-supported Long-Term Ecological Research site, the Conservatory aims to deepen understanding and stimulate imagination by opening ways to listen to the dynamics reshaping coasts. →Website
Environmental Resilience Institute
The Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) is the hub of environmental resilience and sustainability research at the University of Virginia. ERI builds a diverse and collaborative community to accelerate the rate of discovery, trains the next generation of leaders in integrative research, and develops external partnerships to translate research findings into policy and practice. Over 100 faculty from 10 UVA schools are affiliated with the Institute. Focus areas evolve over time to reflect opportunities and need. Current priorities for ERI funding are Climate Resilience, Water and Energy Security, and Environment and Health. →Website
Repair Lab
Racial injustice and climate change are the two most urgent challenges facing democracies today. Environmental justice activists and scholars have made the public more aware of the disproportionate impact of pollution and climate change on communities of color. However, scholars, policymakers, and the public alike tend to treat social and environmental issues separately, hampering our ability to adequately address either. Repairing these social and environmental fractures requires collaborative solutions informed by historical, political, environmental, and local knowledge. The Repair Lab will bring together this expertise, and, in so doing, produce novel research, teaching, and public programming that deepens our understanding of the causes, consequences, and countermeasures of environmental and climate injustice locally and around the world. →Website
Mapping Indigenous Worlds
Mapping Indigenous Worlds is a Mellon Global South Humanities Lab at the University of Virginia. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mellon Global South Initiative empowers faculty, students, scholars, and community members to develop innovative research and curriculum about the Global South. Mapping Indigenous Worlds develops several key themes of the UVa Global South Initiative, most notably race and ethnicity, cartographies and spaces, language worlds, media ecologies and cultures, art and performance, cultures of human rights, and digital inequities. →Website
Read for Action: Climate, Conflict and Humanitarian Crisis
A research collective of scholars and humanitarian experts working across environmental humanities, literature, and public policy using global fiction to spark policy change at scale on climate-induced humanitarian crises. →Website
The Sanctuary Lab
Exploring how climate change bears on sacred sites. We conduct multi-disciplinary inquiry at protected, contested places across the world, investigating how Anthropocene stresses are reshaping cultural landscapes. Sanctuaries reveal vital connections between natural environment and human tradition—we look to them as laboratories for how communities may negotiate the disorientations of rapid planetary change. →Website
Virginia Coast Reserve LTER
The Virginia Coast Long-Term Ecological Research (VCR/LTER) project’s research activities focus on the mosaic of transitions and steady-state systems that comprise the barrier-island/lagoon/mainland landscape of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Primary study sites are located on Hog Island, Parramore Island and mainland marshes near Nassawadox, VA. →Website
WriteClimate
WriteClimate is an association of UVA students fighting for climate change awareness through literary, artistic, and activist means. WriteClimate convenes as a class every Spring semester at UVA (EVSC 1559). The WriteClimate Club operates year-round and expands upon the work done in the class. → Website