Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0277 - Planet on Fire: Reimagining the Future of the World

The desire to save our planet from imminent destruction is shared by growing numbers of people all over the world. Yet debates about climate change, environmental disaster, mass extinction, and possible solutions to them continue to be framed by ideas and discourses that have their roots in capitalist, imperialist, Western, Euro-American or Eurocentric, and patriarchal worldviews. This course examines critical and creative approaches to sustainability and extinction that challenge us to go beyond these frames with a focus on contemporary visual art and visual and spatial practice. Through close looking and analysis of works and portfolios of work (exhibition catalogs and documentation, artist books, photobooks, online archives) by contemporary artists complemented by readings in contemporary literature, philosophy, environmental humanities, and social science, we will look at histories, practices, thought systems, and imagined worlds that teach us to understand the past, present, and future of the planet differently and that offer radical new possibilities for imagining what Anna Tsing calls "the promise of cohabitation," or life on earth. Our looking and reading in the course will center on postcolonial, Indigenous, Black, queer, and feminist perspectives on earth, nature, ecology human-animal relations, and non-humanist or non-human cosmologies. Specific topics might include ecofeminism, queer ecologies, and global indigeneity; climate apartheid and the climate refugee; regenerative agriculture, food justice, and food sovereignty. Keywords: Sustainability, environment, justice, philosophy, postcolonial

Environments and Change Students in this course can expect to spend 6 to 8 hours weekly on work and preparation outside of class time.