Seminar in Composition: Sustainability invites students to engage with Sustainability as both a practice and an interdisciplinary field of study. We will take up writing as a method for engaging the world, for affecting change in the world, and for developing sustainable relationships with all those beings, systems, cultures, networks, and environments that we’re entangled within.
Writing is more than a simple tool of communication, and when taken as such, this simplified view of writing might be taken up as partially to blame for the current crisis of sustainability we’re deep within. When we act as though our writing is merely a means of describing the world from a distance, we reinforce a sharp divide between our selves and the world around us. Instead, we can strive to write in rather than about the world, to develop and shape our relationships with the world.
We will read texts that work to define sustainability and sustainable living. They will both promote particular practices of sustainability and trouble the notion of a sustainability that doesn’t require an overhaul in how we experience and engage the world around us. In informal and formal writing, we will examine what it means to pursue sustainability and what it means to say that we are living through a crisis of sustainability.