WashU Sam Fox School to host symposium on resilience, environmental justice

The WashU Sam Fox School is hosting a symposium titled Resilience as Resistance, March 19-20. The symposium will explore resilience as a form of resistance — a right, a labor, a memory, a reclamation, an act of design. Sessions will focus on the inseparability of our climate and social crises and ask how environmental justice concerns might be re-envisioned through a new resilience framework.

Professor Linda C. Samuels, who is leading the event as part of her role as director of sustainable design and environmental justice, said the symposium is framed around the idea that a new conceptualization and practice of resilience is needed. The new approach should go beyond “bouncing forward” and recognize that resilience planning must acknowledge today’s inherently multi-dimensional and non-linear conditions, that chronic and acute disasters compound and complicate one another in ways we can no longer easily predict. To be resilient now is to challenge the very structures producing vulnerability in the first place.

The symposium will feature a keynote by Jha D Amazi, principal at MASS Design Group, where she is head of their Public Memory and Memorials Lab, and a spoken word artist, event producer, and space-maker for LGBTQ+ communities of color. Her design work includes projects such as the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Project (Chicago, Ill.), the Gun Violence Memorial Project (Chicago, Ill; Washington, D.C.; Boston, Mass; Detroit, Mich.), and the Sugar Land 95 Cemetery Revitalization Project (Sugar Land, Texas).

Breakout sessions will explore urgent challenges of environmental resilience — from coastal adaptation to fire recovery — and social, cultural, and historical resilience. Panelists in those sessions include Alicia Olushola Ajayi, Rev. Rodrick Burton, Dana Cuff, Betsy del Monte, Anya Domlesky, Zachary Lamb, Laura Marett, and Heather Navarro. An afternoon roundtable will turn the focus on St. Louis, bringing together WashU faculty, representatives from city agencies, and community leaders focusing on the region’s recovery following the May 2025 tornado. The roundtable is intended to create space for building relationships and identifying collaboration opportunities in an effort to make St. Louis a more resilience city.

Along with Samuels, the symposium is supported by Assistant Professor Seth Denizen in landscape architecture, Assistant Professor Rayshad Dorsey in architecture, Lecturer Bomin Kim in urban design, and MArch/MLA candidate Quinn Adam.

The symposium is free and open to the public, registration is requested. For more information and registration, visit this page.