Sustainability Cultural Organizers
Cultural organizing is the strategic use of art and culture to organize a more sustainable community.
The Student Life Sustainability Cultural Organizers (COs) are an interdisciplinary team of undergraduate and graduate students who use the arts to envision a more sustainable campus and world. Using U-M’s campus as their studio, COs practice creative adaptation to the climate crisis by producing participatory works that foster resilience, joy, and collective imagination.
Institutional climate responses often overemphasize “hard” science while neglecting relationships, emotional literacy, and non-Western ways of knowing—unintentionally excluding many voices and reinforcing extractive systems. The COs cultivate radical imagination as a skill, offering inclusive ways to examine systems of extraction through creative expression, and creating spaces for healing, play, and connection.
COs help students deepen relationships with one another and the earth through pursuing research, hosting workshops, creating multimedia resources, and collaborating with local culture keepers. Each spring, their year-long projects culminate in an experimental, participatory event and tangible resources that support a lineage of creative resilience practices among UM students.
Past Work
In previous years, Cultural Organizers have hosted events with researchers and activists, curated a student art show, initiated a screenprinting program for student organizations, hosted a variety show for student performers, and collaborated with sustainability and social justice organizations to infuse existing initiatives with art and joy. Most recently, the Cultural Organizers hosted an artist-in-residence for two years. Together, they co-created Noon at Night, a wandering classroom that prototypes creative adaptation to crises through participatory performances and events.
