Faculty Feature: Andrea Baldwin

Andrea Baldwin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Disability Studies and faculty affiliate for the Environmental Humanities program. Eliana Massey, the community engagement and outreach coordinator for the Environmental Humanities program, conducted this interview in January 2026 and edited the transcript for clarity and brevity. The transcript was approved by Andrea Baldwin.  

Eliana Massey: Could you tell me a little bit about your research and how it relates to environmental humanities?

Andrea Baldwin: I'm a Black feminist, that's how I identify as a scholar. Well, a Black and Caribbean feminist. I am from––born and raised and educated––the small Caribbean state of Barbados. I came to the U.S. as an adult. My research focuses on Black feminist geographies and ecologies. I am inspired by people like Katherine McKittrick and others who talk about space as socially constructed and think through metaphors about Blackness and space. The ways that Blackness makes space illegible, and how space makes Blackness illegible. What happens when Black people are inhabiting a space is they are more susceptible to all types of environmental violence. Black people, when they are inhabiting a space, are subject to all types of racial violence because of how the space is coded.  

Before this, I was an attorney and an international trade policy specialist. In this neoliberal late-stage capitalist world, the people who pollute the least are the people who are closer to pollution, and that means that the people I care about the most in this world––my mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, my nieces, my nephews, my friends––are all on the front lines of how environmental injustice shows up on a global scale. We know that Barbados is below sea level, and it's very flat. Glaciers are melting at such an alarming rate. For islands below sea level, it is catastrophic.  

I'm interested in not only how these things impact Black, Brown, and Indigenous people globally, but also how, as Katherine McKittrick says, in her piece on a Black sense of place, Black people also make sense of place. Black people have been engaging in different ways to meet the moment, and have always met the moment. So they're creating, curating, and keeping some consistency, in ways that the environmental justice movement in the West which is racially coded as white in many ways, does not consider.  

Eliana Massey: In 2024, you published “Brackish Possibilities:(Re) Thinking Caribbean Feminist Ecologies” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Can you talk a little bit about that scholarship?  

Andrea Baldwin: I use brackish as a metaphor to think about how when racist environments mix and meet Black people, there's not just a giving up or a surviving. Actually, if we study brackish waters, we know that the organisms that come to brackish waters, they really evolve, and they evolve into aliveness. That turbulence really makes them––and I don't like the word resilient––really makes them alive. I'm using work from Kevin Quashie, Katherine McKittrick, and others to talk about how the brackish metaphor is an apt metaphor for how Black people make life when they meet the turbulence of environmental racism.  

Eliana Massey: Could you tell me a little bit about your teaching and how it relates to environmental humanities? 

Andrea Baldwin: I'm an interdisciplinary scholar, so it's kind of a mixture. I teach anything from Black feminist thought to gender, race, and sexuality in Caribbean culture. This semester, I'm teaching Black feminist geographies and ecologies. I taught the environmental humanities foundations course last semester.  

Would you mind saying a little bit more about your experience teaching the environmental humanities foundations course, and how you approach that course? 

Andrea Baldwin: I had the distinct pleasure of teaching that course with a former student of mine. I co-taught the course with Dr. Leah Ramnath. I was her dissertation chair when I was at Virginia Tech. She had taken classes with me so it was really amazing to be able to teach with her and to see her just do her thing. I was super proud. 

I usually approach my courses not as the sage on the stage, but as a co-learning space. I hope to learn from students as much as they learn from me. And sometimes I learn even more from students than they learn from me. And so that's kind of my philosophy of co-mentorship.  

In terms of our framing and methodology, it was taught from a decolonial perspective. Leah said very early on, like, “You will be getting a buffet, so there's no one person here who we’re pulling from. We're pulling from everybody.” Everybody that has something to say about the environment, from a decolonial perspective, is relevant. And so, the students largely learned from Black and Brown folks from the Global South. At first there were a few students who were like, “We are not learning about the canon.” I was like, “Well, if you know you're not learning about the canon, then you already know the canon, so let's learn something else.” And you're probably never gonna be in another class with a Black woman and a Brown woman teaching together.  

One of the things that I do in all of my classes is I try to have students unlearn how they've been taught to write. We've been taught to engage in this kind of positivist approach, where you and the work are separate. I feel like if we're really going to make a difference, in an environmental justice movement, that we need to understand that we are implicated. So how do we write in a way that implicates us? And that shows that we're learning how we're implicated and how what we're learning can be applied every day in small acts and in big ways? And how is this important to our community who aren't in the classroom? And how can we share that in a way that doesn't alienate people?  

Their main assignments were reflection papers. And, you know, some students were like, “I've never written a paper from the perspective of the I.” I was like, “Write from the I because you are implicated.” And that was really difficult at first because students just didn't know how to write a reflection paper, but I feel like by the end, they were more confident in implicating themselves in what they were learning, as opposed to distancing themselves from what they were learning.  

Eliana Massey: How do you approach community engagement through the Black Feminist Eco Lab? 

Andrea Baldwin: The relationships are the foundation. I started a Black Feminist Eco Lab here on campus. We don't have a lot of money, but we are IN the community. When I started the lab, the first thing we did was we had a workshop where we invited community members and asked them what their idea for the lab was. I said to them, “hey, but I'm new to Salt Lake City.” As much as I'm a Black person, I'm not a Black person from Salt Lake City. I'm an insider-outsider, right? I'm also an outsider because, like, I didn't grow up here. I didn't grow up in the United States writ large. I want to do good for my community, who happen to be Black people in Salt Lake City, because I'm located here. And so I want to build these relationships, and to start from a position of, “You are the people that know.” I'm coming with theory, but I do not have lived experience. I've been in Salt Lake City for all of 6 months, you know? If this lab exists in 2074, what should it have accomplished for it to have been successful to you? And it was a kind of a dreaming situation, but also signaling to the community that whatever we do in 2024 that will be sustainable in 2074 will come from your vision, and so therefore, it needs you.  

And from there, like, community partners have never forgotten that, right? So if I call Rae Duckworth right now, she's gonna be like, “Hey hon, what you need?” Or Rae would be like, “Hey, we need you as a lab to do this.” “We got you.” You know? Or if I call Ashley Finley, “Ashley, I need you to sit on this panel with me for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Like, they asked me to do this thing, and you are an amazing speaker.” Guess who shows up? Ashley.

When we went to the community, we didn't have money, we didn't have nothing, but we built a rapport with the community, coming to them saying, again, like how I go into my class, “We are not the sage on the stage.” We want to do good work, we want to make sure that our communities are engaging in, you know, this sense of aliveness, but we don't know, and so we're coming to you to figure that out.  

We didn't come up with this idea of painting our mural. The community came up with this. So we have a movable mural that we painted at the Tracy Aviary. And the community came out and painted this mural. This happened because Rae Duckworth, who is the executive director of Black Lives Matter Utah, when Salt Lake City was tearing down the mural that represented where police had murdered Black and Brown people, she called us, and she was like, “I need your support.” And so we went out, we did all the things, we went to all the things. And then we're like, so what do we do, not only as a response, but something that emanates from us? We don't want to just respond, but we want to do something that is about us as a living community. And we did a mural. The community came out, painted the mural, we had yoga, we had a panel, we had Black vendors selling their crafts. The mural, when it doesn't live in my garage, is going all over Utah. So right now, it's at Utah State University, it was at the Marriott Library, and this didn't come from us, it came from the community.