8:30 am – 4 pm
moCa Cleveland, 11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106
Radical Visions for Re-Connecting Academia and Nature is a two-day, student-led convergence aimed at advancing climate justice, community resistance and resilience by digging into the deeper systems that shape how we learn, how we teach, how we act, and who our education ultimately serves. The summit is intentionally intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and immersive. It brings together students, faculty, community leaders, activists, and artists from across Cleveland and the Great Lake Erie Southern Shore bioregion. The goal is to emotionally ground participants in the lived realities of climate injustice while creating radical pathways for academic, civic, and career-based action. Our neighborhoods have endured toxic exposure in the air, water and food, disinvestment, and state neglect for generations. And these harms ripple through our education institutions from elementary to university level: students learning in polluted neighborhoods and buildings, schools forced to shut down due to environmental hazards, and young people pushed into debt-heavy educational tracks that prepare them more for corporate labor needs than for critical thinking, creativity, or civic power. At present, faculty are politically pressured to teach in a transactional manner that supports a corporate and administrative profit oriented market based logic. The overall effect leads to profound student alienation, disengagement and anxiety. In the majority of our classrooms, learning no longer supports a deeply intertwined connection with nature, place and humanity. Moral guidance and learning have been supplanted with “information management,” replaceable “skills” and superficial “credentials.” In sum, environmental harms don’t just impact our air and water—students are impacted by what they are taught, who gets to succeed, and whose futures are sacrificed. As students and future leaders, we believe it’s time to create oppositional space for truth-telling, collective grief, visionary problem-solving, and interdisciplinary action. Through art, storytelling, and community building discussions and activities, we aim to shift the climate conversation from abstract science, or policy, to one of healing, reckoning, and collective responsibility. This is not just an academic or climate event—it’s a reckoning with the structures that disconnect us from each other, from our histories, and from the natural world.
This event is sponsored by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, moCa Cleveland, ĂŰĚŇAPP, Cleveland State University, and Cuyahoga Community College.
Advanced registration is required. Please email tish@celdf.org if you would like an invitation as space is limited and RSVP's will be required to attend.