On 10 March 2023, the Department of Social Policy's Race Matters Initiative will host a screening and post-screening discussion of Powerlands (US, 2022), the award-winning documentary about environmental racism, Indigenous agency and climate justice. In Powerlands, a young Navajo filmmaker investigates displacement of Indigenous peoples and environmental devastation caused by the chemical companies that have exploited the land where she was born. On this personal and political journey, she learns from Indigenous activists across three continents that “there is no such thing as the voiceless, only the deliberately silenced or preferably unheard” (Arundhati Roy).

Powerlands will be screened in the LSE’s Sheikh Zayed Theatre from 17:30-18:45 GMT, followed by a post-screening discussion with filmmaker Ivey-Camille Manybeads Tso and climate justice activist Emira Woods of the Green Leadership Trust who will both be joining us via Zoom. The event will be chaired by Social Policy assistant professor and Race Matters Initiative co-coordinator Robtel Neajai Pailey. The event will end at 20:00 GMT.

Pre-screening drinks/snacks will be available for all guests from 17:00-17:30 GMT in the foyer area outside of the Sheikh Zayed Theatre.

This event is open to LSE students and staff. Please pre-register for the event with your LSE email address as only LSE staff and students can access the venue.

Watch the trailer for Powerlands here.

Speakers

Ivey-Camille Manybeads Tso is an award-winning queer Navajo filmmaker. She was a fellow with the Firelight Media Documentary Filmmaker Lab and the 4th World Indigenous Media Lab. She started making films at the age of nine through the Native youth media project Outta Your Backpack Media. At the age of 13 she made the award-winning fiction film In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman, based on the true story of her great-great-great grandmother Yellow Woman, who lived through the Navajo Long Walk of 1864-1868. Ivey-Camille continued to refine her filmmaking with a full scholarship to Idyllwild Arts Academy in California, USA. She later returned to work on films in her community of Navajo Nation. At the age of 19, Ivey-Camille began work on Powerlands, her first feature, which has screened internationally and won several festival awards including the 2022 Rigoberta Menchú Grand Prize.

Emira Woods is a Liberian global justice strategist and advocate focused on people and the planet. She brings an intersectional lens to her work as an environmentalist and political activist specialising in social impact and innovation. Currently executive director of Green Leadership Trust—which strengthens environmental organisations and foundations by building more diverse, equitable and inclusive governing boards and senior leadership across the sector—Emira works at the nexus of race, governance and climate justice. Prior to this, she served as senior advisor at the Shine Campaign, director of social impact at ThoughtWorks and co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Emira has been awarded the 2022 Better Selves Fellowship honouring her work for environmental and social change. A frequent analyst on CNN, Voice of America, BBC and National Public Radio, Emira is widely published on a range of issues from climate change, trade and investment to US military policy.

Chair

Robtel Neajai Pailey is assistant professor in the Department of Social Policy, LSE, and co-coordinator of the department’s Race Matters Initiative. A Liberian scholar-activist working at the intersection of Critical Race Studies and Critical Development Studies, she centres her research on how structural transformation is conceived and contested by local, national and transnational actors from ‘crisis’-affected regions of the so-called Global South. Robtel’s current book project, Africa’s ‘Negro’ Republics, examines how slavery, colonialism and neoliberalism in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, respectively, have shaped the adoption and maintenance of clauses barring non-blacks from obtaining citizenship in Liberia and Sierra Leone. She is author of Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 African Politics Conference Group Best Book Award and contributed to the passage of Liberia’s dual citizenship law.

Powerlands screening and post-screening discussion