(Un)Earthing Black Land Relations: Care, Survival, and Affective Infrastructures of Black Ecologies in Seattle, WA

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Black ecological practices generate forms of knowledge, belonging, and world-making within landscapes structured by settler colonialism and racial capitalism in the Pacific Northwest. Drawing on ethnographic research with Black-identifying outdoor practitioners, environmental professionals, educators, and community organizers in the Seattle region, I argue that ecology is not a neutral domain of environmental management but a relational terrain shaped through histories of settler colonial dispossession, racialized governance, and survival. Rather than approaching Black relationships to land through frameworks of exclusion, access, or environmental injustice alone, this project foregrounds the everyday practices through which Black communities cultivate livable relations to place. Building on scholarship in Black geographies and Black ecologies (McKittrick 2006; Wright 2021; Hosbey and Roane 2021; Moulton and Salo 2022), this dissertation reframes the production of ecological knowledge as emerging through relations of care. Care, as I develop it here, is not simply an ethical disposition but an organizing force that shapes how environments, publics, and subjects are constituted (Gumbs 2020; Sharpe 2016; Hartman 2007; Collins 2000). Within settler colonial land regimes, care sustains projects of property, citizenship, and environmental governance, reproducing racialized hierarchies of belonging (Tuck and Yang 2014; Wynter 2003). At the same time, Black ecological practices mobilize care differently, orienting it toward relation, collective survival, and ongoing negotiation with uneven landscapes. Drawing on ethnographic encounters and public-facing media, the dissertation traces how Black ecological thought circulates through embodied practice, affective relations, storytelling, and pedagogy. In outdoor recreation, participants navigate racialized geographies through practices of attentiveness, risk assessment, and collective presence. In environmental institutions, Black professionals sustain commitments to ecological unity despite bureaucratic constraints that fragment care and limit belonging. In public media and community archives, Black ecological knowledge moves through affective infrastructures that reshape how land, environment, and the public are understood. Together, my research demonstrates that ecological knowledge is not confined to scientific or policy domains but is produced through lived, relational practices that refuse the separation of land from social life. Methodologically, this project draws on Black feminist and decolonial approaches that treat theory as emergent from relation rather than imposed abstraction (Collins 2000; Hartman 2008; McKittrick 2006; Simpson 2014). It employs a mosaic form that moves across ethnography and public media, attending to fragments, repetition, and resonance as analytic tools. This approach foregrounds participants as co-theorists whose practices of care, refusal, and creativity generate conceptual insights into ecological life. As a Black diasporic researcher whose own relations to land are shaped by histories of displacement, I approach this work as a relational practice grounded in accountability to the communities and ecologies that make this research possible. By centering Black ecological practices, this dissertation contributes to anthropological, environmental humanities, and Black studies scholarship in three key ways. First, it shifts the study of environmental knowledge away from institutional production toward relational and embodied forms of knowing. Second, it extends Black ecological and Black feminist theory by elaborating care as a central analytic for understanding how ecological worlds are made and contested. Third, it offers an account of environmental politics that attends simultaneously to structure and possibility, demonstrating how alternative ecological relations are sustained within, alongside, and against dominant regimes. This project opens several directions for future research. It invites comparative work across regions to examine how Black ecological practices take shape within distinct colonial and environmental histories. It calls for deeper engagement with Afro-Indigenous frameworks to further theorize relational land practices across differently positioned communities. It also suggests new avenues for studying public environmental discourse, particularly how affective and relational forms of knowledge reshape environmental governance and pedagogy. More broadly, this research points toward the need for environmental scholarship that takes seriously the relational, lived, and world-building dimensions of ecology as a site of ongoing struggle and possibility.