Sustainability Cultural Organizers
Cultural organizing is the strategic use of art and culture to organize for liberation.
The Sustainability Cultural Organizing program leverages the power of the arts to envision a more sustainable world. Our diverse and multidisciplinary team of student Cultural Organizers (COs) bring a wide range of perspectives and experiences to this emerging SL Sustainability program. As they connect members of the arts and sustainability communities at U-M, the COs hold space to imagine and work toward building alternatives to our racial capitalist systems. Through the development of collaborative multimedia events and art, music, and storytelling projects, COs help to create moments of joy and self-reflection, as well as opportunities for people to build community on and off campus. The driving force behind the work of the COs is to nurture visionary leadership committed to social and environmental sustainability at U-M and beyond. Now and into the future.
Cultural Organizing is nothing new. For as long as humans have had culture, there has been cultural organizing. But its purpose as a tool for social and cultural change has been formalized in the past 100 or so years. The Sustainability Cultural Organizer program works within the lineage of Favianna Rodriguez and the Center for Cultural Power (CCP). CCP emphasizes that climate change, race, gender, and cultural equity are intricately interwoven and must be addressed holistically to create institutional change
Our Work
Noon at Night is a global solidarity network of transgressive learners during this crisis and the next that acknowledge interdependence across difference, utilizing foodways as a binder. A collabortation of University of Michigan students, Southeast Michigan cultural organizers and educators, and experiential learning hubs around the world. Noon at Night is 3 components: a transgressive classroom / radical educational network, a living + growth archive of global student movement work, a cafe that binds our sociopolitical solidarity across difference.
Artist-in-Residence
dawn weleski (they/she) is UM Student Life Sustainability's Artist in Residence. weleski is internationally renowned for their participatory, politically-engaged work, activating and broadcasting the stories of individuals and groups that normative institutions fail to provide. They co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen, a seven-year, seven-day-a-week restaurant that served cuisines from countries in conflict with the United States, and City Council Wrestling, where professional-ameatur wrestlers, local residents and City Council members personified their political interests into wrestling characters that figuratively and literally fought out their conflicts in the wrestling ring.
Their most recent work, Refuse Refuse: Radio, is a speculative fiction radio theatre series that dramatizes current and impending climate catastrophe throughout rural New York State. Broadcast from a mutual aid ambulance, Refuse Refuse will record and transmit survival skill-share workshops and participatory climate collapse drama and is supported by a 2024 Anonymous was a Woman Environmental Art Grant, a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts Grant, and the Harpo Foundation. They regularly exhibit and produce public projects around the world, and most recently exhibited at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 2022-23. weleski holds a BFA in Visual Art with a concentration in Contextual Practice from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University.