Brooklyn, New York, United States
Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is the Director of the Clement Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture & the Modern Experience, Rutgers–Newark. He is a veteran research-driven, award winning historian, teacher, curator, dumpster diver, and public historian. Currently, his priority is to bring members of marginalized communities together to explore their pasts and shape their futures during these times of increasingly climate and global warming disruptions. Tchen has 47 years of experience in building processes of community knowledge co-creation and carrying out participatory and engaged community-building research projects. Throughout his life, he has created spaces for democratic, participatory memory work, meaning-making, and distributed storytelling that support dispossessed communities to speak and advocate for themselves. Currently, Tchen is focused on organizing regionally on climate and ecological justice issues and documenting the intertwined history of dispossession, enslavement, and extreme extraction. Tchen also explains how this new understanding of the region’s history can be used to chart a more just and climate resilient-future. He is the Principal Investigator on a National Science Foundation planning grant to engage these marginalized communities on watershed issues upstream, midstream, and downstream. As part of this planning, he organizes networks of community leaders, collaborators, and proposal writers. He is also developing a 10-year fundraising plan to sustain bioregional collaboration and learning communities. As a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), the NPPC advises the mayor of New York and the New York City Climate Change Adaptation Task Force on issues of climate change and adaptation throughout the 31-county metropolitan area. With a team of researchers, he is at work on a special report about the environmental history of the region, focused on the ecological impacts of settler colonialism and how settlers’ extreme extraction practices, driven by global trade and US expansionism, wreak havoc to this day. In the report, Tchen is also working to create a new paradigm of what technical assistance for BIPOC teachers, artists, organizers, local historians, libraries, concerned residents can mean—especially when linked to the active local knowledge of heat, rain, flooding, wind, and pollution impacts. This dynamic approach to public-expert knowledge partnering creates more reliable databases and improves education and policy-making about climate change's many local and regional impacts.