Episode 43: Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray on Doom, Hope and Navigating the World As It Is

Welcome back to Yeah, I Got an F#%*ing Job With a Liberal Arts Degree! Join Cal Poly Humboldt Dean Jeff Crane as he interviews a range of guests about the value of the liberal arts and higher education as a personal and public good.

This week's guest is Cal Poly Humboldt's own Dr. Sarah Ray.
Sarah has been Program Leader of the Environmental Studies Program here at Humboldt since 2013. She received her PhD in Environmental Sciences, Studies, and Policy, with a focal department of English, from the University of Oregon in 2009. She also holds a BA in Religious Studies from Swarthmore College and a MA in American Studies from UT-Austin. In addition to having edited three collections of environmental studies writing, her first book, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture, published in 2013, explores the ways that environmental discourse often reinforces existing social hierarchies, drawing on a legacy of nativist, racial, and ableist exclusion in environmental history. Her current work is on the role of emotions, mindsets, and collective wisdom in climate justice activism, especially among younger generations. This shift in focus was motivated by the despair she started observing in her students about a decade ago. Focusing on the role of emotions in climate justice advocacy, Ray now teaches, researches, writes, and facilitates workshops and mindfulness courses on the interplay of inner resilience and collective action. Her book on this topic, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (California, 2020), was written to serve as an existential toolkit for the climate generation. Training this focus on students' emotional engagement with climate justice, she turned her attention to considering how climate education can better meet students' distress and passions about climate injustice. This work has resulted in an international network of educators that crowdsourced an open-access database of "existential tools", and another co-edited volume, both called An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators (2024). She teaches and advises in the Environmental Studies BA Program and the Environment and Community Master's program.

Whew! This conversation is a lot and has it all; it is light and heavy, grounded in reality while being aspirational, flirting with optimism while confronting and anticipating pain and trauma, all surrounding the climate crisis.

Let us know what you think of these ideas and read more about Sarah's books here.

The Essential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators can be purchased here.

A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety can be purchased here.

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Yeah, I Got an F#%*ing Job with a Liberal Arts Degree is produced by Abigail Smithson