ENGL 3915A: Special Topics in Creative Writing/ Writing About Climate Crisis. Prof. Nadia Bozak
“How do we write about the climate crisis, something so all-encompassing and fluid it seems to defy articulation and representation? This workshop explores creative and artistic ways of understanding, engaging with, and fostering hopeful responses to the climate emergency our planet is experiencing. Part of what this workshop aims to achieve is responding to and discussing topics underpinning the climate crisis (colonialism, capitalism, technology, legacies of social, racial, and gender discrimination). We’ll also read compelling climate-themed texts by authors such as Octavia Butler and Vandana Singh while working on our creative pieces (and in a genre of your choice).”
Literary Ecological Fieldwork (ENGL 3920, Fall 2024)- Mondays, 9:30-12:30 – Prof. Brenda Vellino
This literary fieldwork course draws together literature, culture, decolonial, Indigenous, environmental and climate humanities, and ecological studies. Together, students will cultivate skills of attentive noticing in response to local habitats such as rivers, wetlands, and urban forests, along with their plant, tree, bird, insect, and wildlife inhabitants. Time will be devoted to exploratory short field work excursions in the Ottawa region adjacent to campus and further afield. Student encounters with the more-than-human world will be supported by guest visits from local Indigenous knowledge keepers, biologists, and artists. These excursions will be enriched by weekly or bi-weekly discussion of creative and scholarly texts. Course readings will be selected from poets, fiction writers, playwrights, creative non-fiction writers, filmmakers, scholars, and knowledge keepers who themselves mentor close observational engagement with elements of the more-than-human-world. The experiential fieldwork component of the course will foster opportunities for students to create their own creative nonfiction fieldwork narratives through writing, sketching, photo, and audio documentation.
ENGL 5900X: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CLMD 6903W) Prof. Barbara Leckie
Topic: Co-writing the Climate Crisis. This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis through the lens of co-writing. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. It will envision writing as a kind of craft or making in which we think out loud together. With respect to the climate crisis, humans write on and with land and climate; this course will, accordingly, ask if co-writing can broaden our sense of what writing means.The course will approach questions of co-writing via three interconnected categories: conversation; correspondence; and cohabitation. While each of these terms have a bearing on the larger questions of climate and the planetary that the course will address, they will also be approached, more narrowly, in relation to talking, writing, and teaching, respectively. Our discussions will be underpinned by the ways in which ideas of the co-, in general, help us to rethink the individual, the nation, and the land. Overall, we will read the work of Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Wynter, among others, to consider more closely how disciplines in the humanities can contribute to climate action.
CLIM 5000 & 5800: Climate Collaboration. “A seminar on the climate crisis from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches from the humanities, social sciences, public policy, engineering and natural science, students will engage with the many factors bearing on the climate crisis and how to address it.”