Black Ecologies names an emerging field that stitches together the disciplines of Environmental and Climate Justice, Geography, Ethnography, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, Black Studies to challenge hegemonic approaches to environment, climate, space, place, and nature. As a framework, it invites us to consider how colonial and racial ideology is embedded in the design and management of wild and built environments. Similarly, it foregrounds exploration of often overlooked place-based histories, practices and modes of imagining the future. In this course, we ask: How does a Black Ecological framework offer “alternative epistemic entry points for historicizing and interrupting mounting ecological crisis”? (Roane and Hosbey 2019). We will examine how Afro-diasporic people both relate to space as a category of experience, co-create place through shared practice and experience and adapt to changing and volatile planetary conditions. We will offer systemic and radical analyses (e.g. Black -Marxist/-Feminist) of debates in, and cases of, climate and environmental racism, and simultaneously explore how Black ecologies cannot simply be reduced to being sites of harm and vulnerability. Contrary to popular, U.S.-based imaginations of exclusively urban Black communities, Black people across the globe exist within, and adapt to, a variety of landscapes. In this course, students will investigate place-based Black Ecological practice as a diverse constellation of vernaculars, rather than a unitary form. Through a global comparative frame, we will foreground the value and stakes of diverse forms of Afro-diasporic practices of freedom and survival as they relate to broader Black Atlantic Political cultures of relationality, social justice, alternative knowledge production, spirituality and liberation.