Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Climate Crisis and Environmental Racism

Rhiana Gunn-Wright will engage in conversation with Brahim El-Guabli about the climate crisis, climate policy, environmental racism, and her own fight against climate change.

In 2019, Rhiana Gunn-Wright was included in Time magazine’s list of the “15 Women Leading the Fight Against Climate Change.” She is currently the Director of Climate Policy at the Roosevelt Institute, and a member of the Evergreen Advisory Board.

Rhiana started a career in public policy after graduating from Yale magna cum laude in 2011. Her senior thesis, “Breaking the Brood Mare: Representation, Welfare Policy and Teen Pregnancy in New Haven,” earned several awards at Yale, including the Steere Prize in Women’s Studies. In 2013, she received the Rhodes Scholarship from the University of Oxford, where she obtained an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy in 2015.

In the summer of 2013, Rhiana served as a White House policy intern in First Lady Michelle Obama’s Office, and in 2015, she became a Design Research Fellow at Educational Credit Management Corporation in Minneapolis. She has also worked as the Policy Analyst for the Detroit Health Department, Policy Director for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s 2018 Michigan gubernatorial campaign, and Policy Director for New Consensus, a D.C.-based think tank. As the policy lead for New Consensus, Rhiana was one of the intellectual architects of the Green New Deal.Rhiana is the author of the critically acclaimed essay “The Green New Deal for All of Us,” and she has written pieces for the New York Times, TeenVogue, and Hammer & Hope.

Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature, Professor El Guabli is a Black, Amazigh Indigenous scholar from Morocco.  In addition to teaching different levels of Arabic language courses, Professor El Guabli teaches or is interested in teaching a variety of topics in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern literature, including trauma and memory, Saharan imaginations, Jews in Arabic literature and film, transitional justice processes, translation, current events, Marxist Leninist Movements, Afro-Arab solidarities, and decolonization movements.

This event is sponsored by the W. Ford Schumann ’50 Program in Democratic Studies with support from Africana Studies, Geoscience, and Environmental Studies.