Symposium, “Migration, Environment and the Search for Sanctuary,” will take place Friday, March 1, from 9:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., in the campus’s MultiCultural Center Theater. The event will kick off a global public history project that will explore the links and ramifications of a warming planet and the mass movements of people fleeing a degraded environment. It is free and open to the public. David Pellow, Dehlsen Professor and chair of the university’s Department of Environmental Studies, will deliver the keynote at 3 p.m.

 

“We know that environmental change is going to create greater migration flows,” Park said. “It’s always the case that migrants are always involved in environmental movements themselves.”

 

The symposium, presented by UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Asian American Studies and the Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies at Cal State Northridge, is associated with the Humanities Action Lab, a consortium of 21 universities in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and South Africa that collaborate on public history projects. The organization will eventually produce a traveling exhibition of projects generated by its members. The projects, Park said, are student-driven and involve community organizations.

 

The collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and Cal State Northridge recognizes that migration and the environment are linked — but not the way they’re typically perceived, Park noted. “I thought it was really important to have a strong partnership with our Latino/Latinx community, and this is our way to come together and think about migration together,” she said. “We want to show migrants and immigrants are not always an environmental problem, which is generally how it’s seen.”