Tag: Ecological Thought

2 July. Poster Session 1 & AWARE! Animal Embassadors

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Explainer Video Groups


Group Number Group Member Names
One Callie, Hannah, Marlene, and Ryan Piansky
Two Elhadji, Keanu, Benjamin, and George
Three Malina, Hajime, Peyton, and Gunhyun
Four Aaquila, Xiang, Brianna, and Yue
Five Ryan Enfeild, Ryan Kretzmer, James, Isaiah
Six Brian, Uti, Devarsh and Ibitola

Poster Session 1

Presenters:

Set up by taping your posters to the white boards around the room.

Audience:

As the presenters set up, we’ll go over a few ‘best practices’ for responding to presentations

Presentation Session Assignments


Session 1 Presenters Session 2 Presenters
James Peavy Hannah Fallon
Ryan Enfield Peyton Nguyen
Hajime Minoguchi Callie Anderson
George Frampton Marlene Garcia Gomez
Brian Buckley Aaqila Faizer
Ryan Piansky Yue Teng
Devarsh Pandya Elhadji Barry
Ryan Kretzmer Malina Hy
Keanu White Isaiah Sutherland
Xiang Li Ibitola Toyin-Adelaja
Utibeno Ekpoudom
Gunhyun Park
Hajime Minoguchi
Brianna Shearwood
Benjamin Holmes

Audience Best Practices

Listen

Try to keep the following in mind as you listen to the presenters’ pitches:
  • 1. What sort of development project does the speaker present?
  • 2. According to the presenter, what makes the project sustainable?

Look

Keep the following in mind as you look at the presenters’s posters:
  • 1.How the poster respond to the rhetorical situation, i.e. illustrate an issues related to sustainability trough a local/national development project?
  • 2. How does the poster catch and sustain your attention via design choices: alignment, proximity, contrast, chunking, etc.?

Respond

Synthesize your looking and listening into a question that helps the presenter make connections and/or advances their project or your understanding:
  • 1.Key terms: I like that you drew our attention to ________ project. I wonder if you could say more about how Caradonna, Morton, or Clark’s terms describe the project you illustrate.
  • 2. Imagery/Design: You do a really nice job illustrating ___________ in___________ portion of your poster. What guided your design decisions?
  • 3. Scaling up: I love that you chose to illustrate _______ as an example of ________. What does the development project you chose say about the context in which it was created? Does the issue you chose challenge assumptions about the defintion of sustainability?   

AWARE! Wildlife Ambassador Animals Event

Please keep the following in mind as we watch the Ambassador Animals Event
  • 1. What social forces displace local animals?
  • 2. What sorts of development projects can ensure equity for both human and animal inhabitants?
  • 3. What sorts of claims does the AWARE! ambassador make? Are you persuaded? Why/why not?

27 June. The Ecological Thought Post Nature

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Featured Image: NOLA Water Treatment Facility Katrina Repairs 

Housekeeping

  • 1. Good work at the workshop yesterday. If you navigate to the Poster Assignment Page, please find some How-to materials in the right hand column.
  • 2. Multimedia Studio printing turn around time?
  • 3. I forgot to ask you to put your name on the Google form I sent out for Poster Presentation Preferences. You can have three extra credit points if you present on Monday.

Freewrite

Freewrite: Write a response to the following question for 7-10 minutes without stopping, and be prepared to share your answer with the class:

In a few sentences, describe the local or national development issue/project have you chosen to illustrate the concept of sustainability in your poster. Then, in a few more sentences, explain what exactly the issue/project you chose aims to sustain, i.e. preserve, protect, maintain.

Morton Discussion

Organize yourselves into groups according to the first few letters of your last name, and answer the question below that corresponds with your group number:


Group Number Group Names
Group 1 A-E
Group 2 F-H
Group 3 M-N
Group 4 P
Group 5 S-W
Take 10-15 minutes to discuss your answer in your group & be prepared to cite evidence when you respond to your question.

  • Group One: List some of the ways that Morton defines the ecological thought. Are you ever satisfied with his definition? Is he?

  • Group Two: List some of the rhetorical or stylistic choices Morton makes in this chapter. How does his rhetorical style compare with Caradonna’s? Is one author more successful than the other, why/why not?

  • Group Three: What does the term “Nature” describe according to Morton? Why do we have to let go of “Nature” to have ecology? Do you agree, why/why not?

  • Group Four: What happens to the concept of personhood or the human when it expands under the ecological thought? For instance, what do you think Morton means when he says that “The ecological thought fans out into questions concerning cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and the irreducible uncertainty over what counts as a person” (8)?Do you agree, why/why not? 

  • Group Five: What sorts of artwork best demonstrate the ecological thought? To respond to this question, examine at least one movie, book, etc. that he talks about as an example of the ecological thought. Can you think of your own example(s)? Do you agree with his assessment, why/why not?

Break!!

Discussion of “Nature, Post-Nature”

Get out the Clark essay and be prepared to discuss the following:
  • 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 is the Anthropocene? How does the Anthropocene mess with distinctions such nature and culture or human and nature?
  • 3. What “scenarios” does Clark propose would “avoid the disasters of the Anthropocene” (84) if implemented? What keeps his proposals from being implemented?
  • 4. How does Clark’s definition of nature compare to Morton’s defintion? How does Clark’s definition compare to Caradonna’s?

Finally…How might you incorporate Morton or Clark’s ideas into your poster?

 

 

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?