This Will Change Everything: Teaching the Climate Crisis

We argue that US sociologists have been woefully remiss in incorporating the climate crisis into our research agendas and, even more, into our teaching. After laying out the gravity of the situation we issue a call for sociologists to consider whether they wish to continue this striking denial of responsibility to our students and to knowledge production. We then present four ways that we have infused our understanding of climate change, climate crisis, and climate justice into courses on global issues, social movements, inequality, and much more. We believe that "climate justice"—the key concept that drives our concern as scholar-activists working closely with undergraduate students—allows for a proper sociological emphasis on structured inequality and relational/intersectional thinking. The article also points interested readers to resources that we have created, and invites them to contribute to a new project on writing case studies for teaching the climate crisis.