Abstract
At the center of this work is a constellation of ideas, thinkers, scholars, and activists focused on stories shared through and with the idea of: what’s missing? When trees have a missing ring, these are often the most indicative of intense climatic and/or ecological conditions that render a tree “no-growth” during a given calendar year, yet these absences are often the most crucial to understanding the broader histories of landscapes. This dissertation works to locate and listen to those ‘missing rings.’ The medium in which this question is interrogated is through the commitments of scholar-activism (left) and tree ring sciences (right) that incorporates an undisciplined approach learning from and co-creating with local and incarcerated communities, narratology, creative justice-based pedagogies, Indigenous epistemologies, Black studies, jazz composition, sociology and hauntologies, oral histories, critical climate studies, queer trans ecologies, and beyond. These studies culminate in working towards creating and teaching more just futures for human and more-than-human worlds under intensive climate and ecological collapse from settler colonialism and racial capitalism.