Hi, Kiana! Let’s begin with a little introduction: tell me who you are, the place you call home, and the space you work within!

Hi Bella, so lovely to connect with you and this wonderful community! My name is Kiana Kazemi, I use she/her pronouns, and I have the privilege of wearing many hats in many different communities and spaces. It’s difficult for me to answer where I am from, but the short answer is that I was born in Iran, I grew up in New Zealand, and I currently live in the US. I am in my third year of studying data engineering with an emphasis in environmental justice at UC Berkeley. Much of the work I do both at school and in educational/activism spaces is really interdisciplinary and requires an understanding of a wide array of both social and technical topics. I truly feel that we should all be moving through life with an intersectional understanding of the world, so I aim to center that in all of my work.

Let’s dive into your journey with environmentalism and your connection to the Earth. Tell me about the childhood experiences that influenced this connection, and now your passion for environmental justice.

My mother’s side of the family is from a city in Iran called Shiraz. The people of Shiraz are known for their love of the outdoors and enthusiasm for celebrating the joys and pleasures of nature. It’s safe to say that my family has stayed true to their roots in that regard. Although I was born in the very polluted and industrialized city of Tehran, I grew up traveling around Iran’s most beautiful natural sceneries with my grandparents. Their love for the outdoors instilled in me my love for the environment. After moving to New Zealand at the age of eight, I took a lot of solace in the patches of nature that exist in every corner of the country. The cultural and language barriers I faced meant I could communicate only through the things I was familiar with, and so I joined my first environmental organisation: a gardening club at my elementary school. The mixture of safe community and environmental education that came from that space really launched my institutionalised passion for the environment, somewhat different from my own raw experiences of being in nature, but still rooted in that appreciation. I was really lucky to find an environmental community in which I felt like I belonged, but as I continued my exploration of environmentalism I began to notice a detachment between my identity, experiences of growing up in the Middle East, and the issues that were often concentrated on in the environmental space. It wasn’t until I was much older and came across a few incredible mentors and friends that I was able to begin connecting the dots between the social and environmental issues I had faced growing up, and also those I had witnessed people close to me experience. I remember first hearing the term environmental justice and just having something powerful click in my brain because I finally had the vocabulary to describe the experiences I had grown up with. Which I still believe is so strange, having grown up for most of my life in the “environmental” sphere, and never having come across that term in my education. So of course, I have since dedicated much of my work to the environmental justice movement, and to centering the important work and voices of BIPOC activists that are fighting for a just future for us all.

I’d love to hear about the spaces and platforms you utilize as an activist. What has that been like?

As a brown kid interested in organising and direct action, I was never big on social media (my parents are still concerned about how many protests I go to/organise) and in fact was one of the last people in my friend group to download Instagram, so it’s surprising now that so much of my work involves that platform. However, what I have loved since I can remember, is the art of storytelling through words and photographs, and now the pairing of the two together. I can’t say that I am very good at either, but I really love that I can treat my Instagram as a virtual version of my journal, telling both my own story, as well as the stories of those that I represent in the communities I am in. I feel that I have an immense amount of privilege in the education I am able to get at Berkeley, and at a very early stage in my time there I realized that there is a really big gap in access to educational resources around topics that impact all of us.

"Academia is rooted in so many colonial systems of oppression, and so many of the products of these academic institutions uphold those same systems. As a result, I’ve become really intentional about democratizing access to what I am learning both in school and from any other opportunities I have access to, and platforms like Instagram are a useful tool for doing that. At the same time, I realise the harm that social media can have, so I’m always looking for ways to extend community outside of that space and create opportunities for learning in more interactive and community focused ways."