Special Session

Ecocriticism and Science / World Literatures and Comparative Studies

Robert Decker (University of Southern California)
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Chloé Vettier (Scripps College)
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This session will explore not only how we translate environmental media into our teaching practices but also how we can encourage our students to reflect critically about environmental concepts like the Anthropocene. How can we prepare them to approach environmental questions from antiracist, decolonial, feminist, indigenous and/or queer perspectives? What kinds of alternative worldmaking might they envision? This panel welcomes presentations on texts, documents, philosophies, activities, assignments, syllabi, and other media that panelists have effectively used in the classroom to teach about and against the Anthropocene. The goal of this session is not only to share successful pedagogical approaches but also to spark a dialogue on how the humanities can act in an age of planetary crisis.

In the decades following Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s essay “The Anthropocene,” the term has come to evoke the dangers posed by anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation, amplified natural disasters, and mass extinctions. But as the ubiquity of the Anthropocene hypothesis grows, scholars have increasingly questioned its value, and particularly, its capacity to obfuscate the systemic forms of social and environmental injustice that underpin the globalized economics of exploitation and extraction. Who, exactly, is responsible for the environmental crisis? Who is empowered and who is disempowered to make choices about our environmental futures? How might the urgency of finding global solutions to the climate crisis accelerate the erosion of local sovereignty? Who constitutes the universal “we” conjured by the Anthropocene?

As the consequences of climate inaction become increasingly pressing and present in the public imaginary, it is urgent that the upcoming generations of students rethink their relationship with their environment. The humanities, with their dual focus on fostering critical thinking and generating creative solutions, seem more important than ever. How then, as humanities educators, can we encourage our students to reflect critically about their relationship to the environment without perpetuating the anthropocentric and colonial mindsets responsible for the accelerating destruction of the earth’s biosphere? How can we prepare them to recognize and critique bad-faith environmentalism and greenwashing? What kinds of alternative worldmaking might they envision?

This session aims to explore not only how we translate environmental media into our teaching practices but also how we can encourage critical reflection about environmentalisms and their histories. This panel welcomes short presentations on texts, documents, philosophies, activities, assignments, syllabi, and other media that panelists have effectively used in the classroom to teach about and against the Anthropocene. The goal of this session is not only to share successful pedagogical approaches but also to spark a dialogue on how the humanities can act in an age of planetary crisis.