# Nikki Hoskins, Assistant Professor of Religion and Ecology ## expand\_more ![Nikki Hoskins headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-05/Nikki-Hoskins.jpg?itok=2lB7QuIN) Nikki Hoskins, MDiv ’12, joined the HDS faculty in 2024 as Assistant Professor of Religion and Ecology. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago in a family of pastors and deacons, Hoskins was raised with the understanding that faith and civic responsibility are intertwined. This ethos, along with questions of environmental racism and environmental activism, guide her academic career and scholarly focus on religion, ecology, race, and colonialism. Read on to learn about Hoskins’ scholarship and teaching, and what lessons she hopes students take away from her courses. ## Where did you grow up? What was the role of religion in your upbringing? I am from the South Side of Chicago, and I grew up in a family that was full of Christian ministers, pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers, community leaders, activists, and prayer warriors, as we say! So religion has always been a part of my life, and faith always went hand in hand with political action and communal responsibility. For example, my uncle Michael Evans was a pastor, and he worked for an organization called Developing Communities Project (DCP), a faith-based community organization. After church, through DCP, my family and I would often go door to door to raise awareness about policies affecting far South Side residents, share resources about job and educational trainings taking place at local churches, and even pray with people who were going through a hard time. We wanted to improve the quality of life for our community and that meant encouraging political activism, getting them actual resources for their everyday needs (groceries, childcare, medication, bus fare, etc.), and importantly, attending to their spiritual needs. ## What led you to pursue a master’s degree at HDS? How did being at HDS influence the way your academic career developed? I went to Spelman College for my undergraduate degree, and professors Rosetta Ross, Nami Kim, and Jamillah Karim, really opened my eyes to the academic study of religion. Another professor, Tarshia Stanley in the English Department, was hugely influential. I met Professor Stanley while taking a course called “African Diaspora and the World,” a required course for all Spelman students. During that class she encouraged all my questions about blackness and religion, and she introduced me to ethnography by including me as a research assistant in all her fieldwork in Atlanta for about three years. I didn’t realize until much later how rare of an opportunity that was. But then again, that was my experience at Spelman—faculty are deeply invested in their students. For example, Professor Rosetta Ross encouraged me to think about doing a master’s and PhD and handed me a pamphlet for Harvard Divinity School. I ended up attending the Diversity and Explorations program (DivEx) at HDS and I remember having a blast with all of these kids of color who loved to study religion, just like me. HDS was also attractive to me because it is multireligious. The study of religion at Spelman is the same—students are required to study at least two different religions. Coming from that environment, it was important to be at an institution that also privileges and reflects that. There were several professors at HDS who had a major impact on me. I was fortunate to take classes with Stephanie Paulsell, who embodied the spirituality of intellectual work and brought a profound kind of attention to what we read and how we interpreted it. From Stephanie, I learned the spiritual and ethical dimensions of reading and writing, and the various ways we encounter the divine in those processes. Toward the end of my MDiv, I read Mayra Rivera's Touch of Transcendence. That book is theologically rigorous, but it's also very poetic and spiritual, and that was the first time I had read anything that helped me see a possibility for myself in this work. I read Mayra’s book in Susan Abraham’s class, “Christianity Between Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” and it cannot be overstated the impact that class had on my understanding of religion and coloniality, and the necessity of critical theory. Professors Paulsell, Rivera, Abraham, and other HDS professors, collectively helped me tap into a core part of the kind of scholar I wanted to be. ## Your scholarship focuses on the intersection of religion, race, and ecology. How did you decide to pursue your field of study? The study of religion, and my faith practice, feels like it came first, but the environmental piece of it has always been there too; I just had not unlocked it. Religion, race, and the environment feel enmeshed to me. I always wrestled with questions about the environment from a young age. We were very poor, and my dad’s side of the family, as well as my oldest brother, grew up in a housing project called Altgeld Gardens which is surrounded by the largest concentration of hazardous waste sites in the country. Hazel Johnson, mother of the Environmental Justice Movement, named Altgeld the “Toxic Doughnut” because it sits in the middle of a ring of landfills and dumping grounds for toxic industrial waste. It also used to be a sewage farm for over 100 years. Instead of the city of Chicago disposing of the waste and remediating the land, they just built a Black housing project on top of it. As a result, the air, water, and soil of Altgeld Gardens is highly polluted. The hazardous waste leaching into the neighborhood caused significant and widespread health problems for the residents—like cancers, rashes, and respiratory issues—and many premature deaths. I think I always wrestled with questions about the intersection of race and ecology from a young age, but because of feelings of shame of my family’s struggle with environmental racism, I didn't initially pursue that field of study. But little by little, over time, through historical and sociological research and spending time with activists in Altgeld, I was able understand the complex history of race and ecology in Chicago and determine what kind of stories I need to tell as an academic. It’s really quite fascinating—Black history and Black life in Chicago, I think, is a great case study for understanding the many layers of climate change. When I did my PhD at Drew University, I studied with professors such as Traci West, a Christian social ethicist, Kesha Moore, an urban sociologist, Laurel Kearns, sociologist of religion and professor of religion and ecology, and Catherine Keller, a constructive ecotheologian. They also helped me make sense of these religious, ecological, sociological, and ethical questions. But honestly speaking, there is no better education than studying with the Black women environmental activists who have been doing this work for over fifty years: Cheryl Johnson, Veronica Kyle, Patricia Jackson, Gwen Hoskins, and Ophelia Muhammad, to name a few. While doing my ethnographic research in Altgeld, it was clear to me that as folks who have been most impacted by environmental harm and climate change, and as folks who are constantly forced to navigate governmental systems, industrial corporations, lawyers, and researchers, they have a deep repository of knowledge and robust insights on the racial, political, and economic layers that structure how we think about the earth and climate change. And undergirding all of this are the deep spiritual lives of these women, which allows them to be face to face with some of the most powerful (read dangerous) people who benefit financially and politically from polluting the earth and their community, and look them in the eye, and in full voice say “no,” and keeping saying “no.” ## Can you describe a course you are currently teaching? What lessons do you hope your students take away from your courses? I’m currently teaching a seminar called “The Religious and Ecological Dimensions of Octavia Butler's Parables.” In this course, I’m helping students understand the historical and cultural context in which Butler wrote and the Black literary tradition that she pulled from, and how that's also very deeply ecological. My hope is that students come away from the class understanding the richness of Black ecological practices and Black religion—and the enmeshment of the two. My hope is that they understand that Octavia Butler, rather than a kind of prophet predicting the future, is drawing on history that keeps repeating itself—an imperial boomerang is what Aimé Césaire calls it in Discourse on Colonialism. What does it mean for us to be present to this history, to be present to the historical critiques that were made, and to be present to the ways people navigate ecologically, over and against spaces that are meant for their death? How can that inform our present environmental and climate crisis? The question that climate change poses is: Who or what are we deciding we will be as a society? And I think Butler’s Parable series really gets at that by mapping history onto the future, and the powers, behaviors, and desires that continue to blind us from seeing, properly diagnosing, and creatively responding to the multitude of environmental catastrophes that have already happened throughout history, and so continue to boomerang back in new but often identical forms. I also think what Butler does well is that she holds the possibility that religion can be a form of critique and something that can be shaped to transform our world for the good. This is also one of my favorite things about Black theology. Neither throws religion away wholesale but rather uses it to critique systems of injustice and in doing so, constructively reimagines how we can live more responsibly with each other and our more-than-human kin. *—by Sarah Rubin* See also:- [ HDS Fund Community Impact Report ](/page-type/hds-fund-community-impact-report) [ See the Full HDS Community Impact Fund Report. arrow\_circle\_right ](https://www.hds.harvard.edu/hds-fund-community-impact-report)