BUSTH STM Student Jere Schulz (’21) Wins Innovate@BU Sustainability Innovation Grant
The original story was published by the Daily Free Press on March 23, 2021. The following is an excerpt only and features Jere Schulz (STM’21). Please click here to read the full article.
BU students win sustainability innovation grants, tackle climate change from new angles
By Divya Sood
Our world faces numerous barriers regarding sustainability. But at Boston University, there is hope. From first-year students to graduating master’s students, Terriers are making substantial inroads in addressing environmental issues.
BU Sustainability and Innovate@BU awarded seven Sustainability Innovation grants earlier this month to student-led projects for the BU community and beyond.
With the $500 grant, teams of students can bring their ideas to fruition and launch high-impact projects centered around carbon, curriculum, connection and more.
The Queer Art of Sustainability
Jere Schulz, a master’s student in BU’s School of Theology, co-founded The Queer Art of Sustainability to empower gender and sexually diverse people advocating for environmental justice.
“I’m really very passionate about queer culture, queer content, I think that you can never have enough,” Schulz said. “I was thinking, what about the sustainability of people, particularly queer people?”
After first thinking about investigating the impact of sex products on the environment, Schulz pivoted to look at the “sustainability of queerness” and drag performers, many of whom he said have been performing on “TheServeNetwork” on Twitch, a video live streaming platform, since the pandemic.
The project will culminate in a Twitch event featuring multiple performers recycling materials from past shows in their performance, sharing stories about their work and “how drag sustains them as people,” Schulz said.
They said missions like this are especially important because studies have shown that climate change can disproportionately affect the LGBTQ+ community — queer people are more likely to be excluded from disaster relief, become homeless and have less access to health care, and environmental changes can further negatively impact those existing threats.
“We really want to emphasize that sustainability goes beyond the things that you typically think of,” Schulz said. “Queer life … and I would especially name that trans life is something that is not talked about as being sustainable in America, and so we wanted to uplift that reality, that people and communities should also be really involved in the conversations around sustainability.”
Schulz said creating more queer content, at BU specifically, is very important. Schulz said she hopes the University’s support for this project leads to further efforts to amplify queer voices.
Schulz said he hopes the event and ones like it help preserve this “really important cultural phenomenon,” during the pandemic, while allowing more people to engage with and learn about queer culture.