This course introduces students to important authors, texts, topics, theories, and conversations in the environmental humanities. Students will carefully read and discuss a range of theoretical texts centered on questions of nature and the environment. Readings are likely to include eco-phenomenologies, thing theories, critical animal studies, slow violence, queer ecologies, and the geological turn, among other topics. The activity of close engagement with theoretical material will enable students to consider how texts encourage particular forms of comprehension and interaction with the environment, and to interrogate the intellectual and material consequences that accrue from particular ways of conceptualizing natureculture. As a required course in the first semester of the NCSS MA degree, the course creates a common vocabulary and experience for all NCSS MA students. The course can also be taken as a stand-alone seminar by non-major graduate students. Run as a seminar, students will engage in weekly discussions of course readings and complete regular writing assignments and complete regular writing assignments, and complete independent research related to the discussions, topics, readings, and other activities of the course.

Offered as NCSS-700G and LAS-C700.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Major Requirement | MA Nature-Cultures-Sustainability Studies

This course introduces students to important authors, texts, topics, theories, and conversations in the environmental humanities. Students will carefully read and discuss a range of theoretical texts centered on questions of nature and the environment. Readings are likely to include eco-phenomenologies, thing theories, critical animal studies, slow violence, queer ecologies, and the geological turn, among other topics. The activity of close engagement with theoretical material will enable students to consider how texts encourage particular forms of comprehension and interaction with the environment, and to interrogate the intellectual and material consequences that accrue from particular ways of conceptualizing natureculture. As a required course in the first semester of the NCSS MA degree, the course creates a common vocabulary and experience for all NCSS MA students. The course can also be taken as a stand-alone seminar by non-major graduate students. Run as a seminar, students will engage in weekly discussions of course readings and complete regular writing assignments and complete regular writing assignments, and complete independent research related to the discussions, topics, readings, and other activities of the course.

Offered as NCSS-700G and LAS-C700.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Major Requirement | MA Nature-Cultures-Sustainability Studies

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year Students are pre-registered for this course by the department.

Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Transfer Students register into the designated section(s).

Major Requirement | BFA

This course takes its title, Visionary Fiction, from the term coined by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Through an exploration of a variety of science/speculative fiction (sf) invested in decolonization, liberation, nonlinear time, the environment, and critiques of dominant narratives of power, students will encounter sf short stories, novels, literary theory, personal essays, comics, films, and songs and music videos. This course, in its commitments to visionary fictions, includes Afrofuturist cultural production, Indigenous Futurities, and works committed to Multispecies Futures, Feminist Futures, and Queer Futurity, among others. As a creative extension of their reading in this course, students will generate their own visionary works of sf. A few of the course's framing questions include: Why and how does science fiction lend itself, as a genre, to a critique of the present? How does encountering science fiction through the lens of visionary fiction change, complicate, expand, and/or subvert sf genre expectations and stereotypes? What are the political stakes of imagining the future, and for whom? As readers, what are the implications and embodied experiences of imagining different futures in our current global moment of lingering pandemic, active protest and revolution, continued colonization, capitalism, extinction, and climate change?

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

This course will take an energy justice approach to fiction, theorizing, artistic production, and activism focused on various energy systems, including (but not limited to) fossil fuels, electricity, renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy, and their respective infrastructure systems. Throughout the semester, we will study the relationship between cultures and energy systems, examining how each energy systems are experienced, theorized, represented, narrated, mediated, resisted, and reimagined. Fundamentally, this course asserts that knowledge and cultural production from BIPOC communities and communities in the Global Souths are central (not auxiliary) to understanding modernity, the future, what it means to live well and sustainably, and how these are entangled with energy systems. This course also seeks to strengthen the commitment of the environmental and energy humanities to social, racial, anticolonial, environmental, energy, participatory, epistemic, and recognition justices. Some of the questions animating this course include: How and why has energy injustice been normalized and perpetuated? What knowledges are produced through scholarly, pedagogical, and creative engagements with energy? How are communities of color, Indigenous, working class, and downriver communities disproportionately impacted by energy regimes, and how are they organizing, resisting, and reimagining them?
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

This course focuses on Indigenous conceptions of gender and sexuality, centering Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, Indigi-queer, and Two Spirit People. With core focuses on memoir, poetics, and felt theory -- which understands the body to be an important site of knowledge formation -- this class aims to draw attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality. The class will foreground relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as vital methods of knowledge creation and cultural production. We will focus on how Native creators remap and reimagine gender, sexuality, colonial violence, and the relationship between people, kin, communities, temporality, and the land. Authors might include, but are not limited to: Terese Marie Mailhot, Deborah Miranda, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tommy Pico, and Joshua Whitehead.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective