Knowledge Share Description
In this knowledge share, we will be discussing the role of plants in diaspora with a focus on coconuts and other oilseed in coastal Guerrero, Mexico. These plants have served as important conduits of liberation for Afro-Indigenous communities through Mexican Independence, the Mexican Revolution, and the agrarian reforms that followed. After thinking through these plant histories of liberation and struggle, we will discuss black and indigenous writing more broadly and practice a few thought experiments and creative writing activities together.
We will explore:
Learn about the role of plants in the African Diaspora with a focus on coconuts and oilseeds in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero in Mexico
Think about and sharpen our environmental literacy skills
Learn about Black and Indigenous Environmental histories in Mexico and the US South
Practice brief creative writing and storytelling exercises.
Cost
$35 - early bird until February 2
$45 - low income
$65 - standard
$90 - pay-it-forward (if you have financial abundance, this is our pay-it-forward option to fund our full tuition scholarships)
or access this knowledge share via our Living Library
For more information on sliding scale please check out this amazing work!
The zoom link will be sent upon registration. Recording will be available for 30 days.
Please apply here for a scholarship.
Living Library
You can access this knowledge share and all of our 2025 knowledge shares by becoming a member of the Living Library.
We invite you to become a member of our Living Library, Herban Cura’s digital school & archive. The Living Library, is a subscription giving access to over 200 hours of present and past knowledge shares by wisdom holders, professors, land stewards, seed keepers, and investigators spanning Indigenous horse connections & dark sky wisdom, to seaweed medicine & more.
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Accessibility Information
Virtual Gathering
*ASR (automated) captioning provided
The knowledge share zoom link will be sent out immediately upon purchase, along with any other necessary information.
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
5:00pm - 7:00pm Eastern Standard Time
Class will be recorded and available for 30 days. This means you can join from anywhere in the world.
Facilitator
Jayson Maurice Porter (PhD, Northwestern, 2022) is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was born in Maryland like his great-grandmother Winona Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked on family farm land near where our ancestors were enslaved on the Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. Jayson's research specializes in environmental justice history, political revolution and land reform, agrochemicals and agribusiness, food systems and foodways, and Black and Indigenous ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. He is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He is working on a book manuscript with Duke University Press on the history of race, violence, and environmental justice in Guerrero, Mexico through oilseeds crops, such as cotton, sesame, and coconut palms. This work hopes to tell an environmental biography of Guerrero--the person, the place, and their politics--and offer an environmental analysis to the history of violence, blackness, and indigeneity in the state from between the political and green revolutions (1910s-1970s). In addition to the book project, he is co-editing a special issue on Global More-than-human histories of Palms with Sophie Chao and Pilar Egüez Guevara. You can also find his writing in Washington Post, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Distillations Magazine, Black Perspectives, Environmental Humanities, Environment and Society, and more. As an environmental justice practitioner, Jayson loves to connect with other black environmental educators and design environmental-literacy programming, such as the Environmental Justice Freedom School he co-designs and co-facilitates with the Chicago Teachers Union (2023-2024). He is currently an inaugural Black and Indigenous Climate Faculty Fellow in the University of Maryland's Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He was a Fulbright García-Robles Scholar with a branch of the Department of Human Rights in Mexico City (2019-2020) and Social Justice Intern for the Organic Trade Association in (2021-2022). As a board member of Rutgers University's Black Ecological Lab, he helps lead EJ literacy work and field schools that center black-led climate-action strategies in Mississippi, where he went to high school and college.