Category: Reading Questions

RQ: hooks, Preface and “Kentucky Is My Fate”

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Featured Image: Blue Ridge Mountains

Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read bell hooks, Preface and “Kentucky Is My Fate.” The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

Preface

Let’s start thinking about hook’s opening question:

“Can we embrace an ethos of sustainability that is not solely about the appropriate care of the world’s resources, but is also about the creation of meaning—the making of lives that we feel are worth living?” (1)

How does the “Shadowy history of slavery” find expression in the world of real estate (3)?

How/why will hooks engage with Wendell Barry’s work?

How will hooks look to the past and her past, but without idealizing the history/her past. In other words, how does she plan to avoid the problem of nostalgia when writing about place and family?

Chapter 2, “Kentucky Is My Fate”

How/why does the opening line of the chapter echo Thoreau? What does hooks do differently?

Why open a story about living in a place, and to a lesser extent the past, with the vision of her own death? How does the image of “scattering my remains as though they are seeds and not ash”(6), figure the future and also avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia?

What lines divide hooks’ childhood? How does the house she lived in with her family in the Kentucky hills illustrate the spatial and temporal differences of her childhood?

How is Nature (or the Nature hooks experienced as a child) the “foundation of our counter hegemonic black subculture” (8)?

What accounts for her experience where “white and black folks often lived in a racially integrated environment, with boundaries determined more by chosen territory than race” (7)?

How was racial difference enforced when she once hooks moved from the country to the city?

Why did hooks leave Kentucky and what was her experience of place when she was an undergraduate at Stanford?

How/why were hooks and her community separated from nature? Why/how did this separation produce fear of nature in her?

What are the two “competing cultures in Kentucky” (10)?

How does hooks define the term, “A Culture of Belonging” (13)?

How did hooks’ “experience of exile” while in CA for college, “transform [her] perception of the world of home” (13)? What takes her so long to go home to Kentucky?

 

 

 

 

RQ: Burns, Stranded in Atlanta’s Food Deserts”

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Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read Rebecca Burns, “Stranded in Atlanta’s Food Deserts.” The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

1. To what does the term “food desert” refer?

2. How does transportation intersect with food systems?

3. How do the experiences of the families profiled for this article, challenge our assumptions about the use and successfulness of public transit? In other words, we spent a lot of timing talking about the environmental and health benefits of alternative transportation, but what happens if those alternatives are not equitable or equitably distributed?

4. Describe Charles and Emma Davis’s monthly trip to the grocery store. How does it compare with Pollan’s?

5. What were Super Giant, owner Sam Goswami’s plans for his grocery store? According to Dale Royal, why are Goswami’s plans unusual for a grocery store owner? Did Goswami’s plans for his store ever come to fruition?

6. Why are Atlanta’s suburban neighborhoods more likely to be food desserts than neighborhoods inside the perimeter?

7. “Why can we build multimillion-dollar highway systems and multibillion-dollar stadiums but not more grocery stores?” (par. 14)

8. What’s ironic about where many farm to table restaurants source their produce? OR, Why are neighborhoods in ATL, such as those on the south and west sides, both starved for healthy food retails and also home to “at least a dozen urban agricultural businesses—Patchwork City Farms and Atwood Community Gardens, for instance” (par 34)?

9. What are some solutions being tested to solve the problem of food deserts on Atlanta’s westside?

10. Why is “food swamp” a better term than food desert? What does the term “food swamp” mean?

11. What are the aims of the “Fertile Crescent” project?

12. How did Goswami’s urban garden next to Giant Food aim to address sustainability and equity issues in the neighborhood?

13. What happened to Giant Food?

 

 

 

RQ: Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 1-32

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Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read Micheal Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 1-32. The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

Introduction

1.What is the “omnivore’s dilemma,” according to Pollan, and what structures have humans developed to try and solve it?

2. How have some of the solutions to the problem, “what’s for dinner,” created more problems than they have solved?

3. How is eating political and ecological?

Chapter I: The Plant (Corn’s Conquest)

1. Why does Pollan think modern, US grocery stores should astound naturalists (16)?

2. Asking, “what’s for dinner?” provoked Pollan to ask two other questions. What are they?

3. How does Pollan define industrial food?

4. What connection does a steak or plastic bag have with a corn field?

5. Of all the corn based product Pollan lists, which surprised you most and why(18-19)?

6. How can scientists figure out how much corn you have eaten?

7. How does the way corn gathers carbon from the air differ from most other plants?

8. What does Pollan mean when he says, “corn has succeeded in domesticating us” (23)?

9. What does Pollan mean when he says, “corn is the protocapitalist plant” (25)?

10. What is an F-1 Generation? From an economic perspective, what is the appeal of having a plant whose second generation is less productive than its first (31)?

 

 

 

RQ: Clark, “Nature, Post Nature,” (75-89)

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Featured Image taken in a disused chalk quarry in Kent, UK.

Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read Timothy Clark’s “Nature, Post Nature,” 75-89. The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

1.What does Clark mean when he says that the language we have inherited to describe the current environmental crisis is “fragile” (75)? How do the words “nature” and “natural” get “pulled in opposite directions at once” (75)?

2. What are the three basic meanings of ‘nature’ according to Clark (75-6)?

3. How does nature function as a condition “prior to politics” (76)? What examples does Clark provide of this assumption? How is the concept of nature, when imagined by governments or philosophers, as a condition prior to politics, ironically, a political concept itself?

4. What does Clark mean when he calls the “’state of nature’” (76) (on which Rousseau and Hobbes base their concept of the social) “tendentious postulates serving to underwrite a particular view of the political” (76)?

5. What’s the trouble with using a concept of nature to underwrite politics—even if the concept of nature is more “ecological” or modern?

6. Are some genres of writing or some sets of terms/metaphors better suited to representing nature than others, why or why not? How would Clark respond to this question? Why is this a problem?

7. What is the Anthropocene? What’s the irony of the Anthropocene?

8.Why is the nature/culture dichotomy “too crude a tool” for thinking the Anthropocene (80)?

9. OR…are the following problems cultural or natural: “eating Danish pork sausages in Dublin” (80)? “A new car in San Fransciso or Shanghi must also be considered, however minutely, as a threat to the snow line in Nepal or Spitsbergen” (80)?

10. How do these sorts of environmental issues mess with the basic distinctions between “science and politics, nature and culture, fact and value” (80)?

11. What does Clark mean by the term “holism” as applied to humans and the natural world?

12. Are we ready to give up the notion that “some forms of writing are more natural than others” (81)?

13. What does it mean to be suspicious of “any traditionally realist aesthetic” (81)? What sorts of literary genres does Clark think work to represent the Anthropocene?

14. What are some benefits to what Clark calls the “end of externality” (82)? How does the series of literary examples he works through portrait the “end of externality (81)?

15. What “scenarios” does Clark propose would “avoid the disasters of the Anthropocene” (84) if implemented? What keeps his proposals from being implemented?

16. Why/how do critics”evade the question of human nature” (85)? Why is this evasion a problem? How does Clark propose we redress this evasion?

RQ: Morton, “Critical Thinking,” 1-14

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Featured Images: GreenMountainWindFarm Fluvanna

Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read Timothy Morton’s “1-14. The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

  • 1. What’s ecology according to Morton?
  • 2. What does Morton mean by the “Ecological Thought”? What are some ways he defines the term? Are you ever satisfied with definition?
  • 3. Describe the organizational strategy of this chapter? How does it differ from the way Nixon and Clark set up their chapters?
  • 4. How/why does what Morton calls the ecological though disrupt time? What does he mean when he says things such as, “In some strong sense, the ecological thought rigorously comes afterward–it is always to come, somewhere in the future. In its fullest scope, it will have been thought at some undefined point” (3)?
  • 5. Why do we have to let go of “Nature” to have ecology?
  • 6. What does the term “Nature” describe according to Morton? Why is “Nature” a problem in his estimation?  
  • 7. What happens to the concept of personhood (or even species) when it expands under the ecological though? OR, what does Morton mean when he says that “The ecological though fans out into questions concerning cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and the irreducible uncertainty over what counts as a person” (8)?
  • 8. Why do “all artworks…have an irreducibly ecological form” (11)?
  • 9. What sort of interaction between the sciences and the humanities does Morton propose and why?
  • 10. Why doesn’t Morton talk abut “theory” more explicitly? Or, what choices do think he has made in this chapter to be more accessible to non-specialists?

Caradonna, Sustainability: A History (1-20)

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Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read Jeremy Caradonna’s Introduction to Sustainability: A History (1-20). The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

1. How does Coradonna define the term “sustainability?” Are any of the terms that Caradonna uses to define sustainability at odds with one another? Can a society be, for example, both prosperous and ecologically minded? What tools does he suggest, if any, to deal with possible discrepancies?

2. What other movements or terms does “sustainability” subsume?

3. What or who is sustained in by the projects Caradonna sites? In whose interests do we sustain communities and ecosystems?

4. When did “sustainability” first emerge as an “explicit social, environmental, and economic ideal” (1)? What were some early responses to the term?

5. What are the socio/economic conditions under which sustainability and its attendant practices emerged?

6. What forces does “sustainability” seek to counter act?

7. In what ways is “sustainability” necessarily interdisciplinary? What disciplines does the sustainability movement draw upon?

8. Is “sustainability” and endpoint or a process?

9. What is the etymology of the term and how does the history of the word itself help audience make sense of its contemporary applications?

10. What does Caradonna mean when he says, “an ecological point of view” (8)?

11. What sorts of diagrams does Caradonna include? Spend a few minutes looking at the diagram on page 8, what ideas are represented and how do they overlap? How does the diagram of the “three E’s of sustainability” compare to the diagram on the facing page? What does the concentric circle model accomplish that the vendiagram cannot? Which of the two models is more successful and why?

12. Are economic systems both overlapping and independent, or are markets, as Daly argues, “’subsystems within the big biophysical system of ecological interdependence’” (9)?

RQ: WOVENText, (1-40 & 47-50)

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Directions

Keep the following questions in mind as you read WOVENText (1-40 & 147-50). The questions are designed to guide your reading practices and our class discussions. You are not required to provide formal answers in class or online.

1. What is writing, as you understand it? What is WOVEN? Does WOVEN compliment/challenge your expectations?

2.What is the mission of GaTech’s WCP?

3.What do we mean by “correctness”?

4.What are common cognitive activities?

5. What sorts of questions can you expect in the text and in the class? In what order order do the question progress?Why?

6. What is the Comm Center? (11 & 25-28)

7. List all the characteristics that you think define a “good” college writer. Next, make a list of all the qualities you expect your professor expects makes a “good” college writer (or the program expects). Where do the lists overlap? Where do they diverge? What accounts for the similarities and differences? (13)

8. What is “Code Switching”, and what are common modes of address? and How do these terms effect how you write an email (21)?

9. What are the three “critical concepts of communication”? 

10. What do all GATech ENGL courses have in Common (147-50)?