| Course Description |
"This interdisciplinary course studies how individuals and communities in the Global South attempt to make sense of the ‘sense of an ending’ that underlines all warnings about environmental crisis and climate change. Our interdisciplinary course has a doubled foundation out of which our readings and discussions will grow: communal understanding and knowledge about local environments, on one hand, and the relation between such knowledge and the data and information gathered by scientists."
"We therefore begin with a simple question: what is the relation between the Humanities and the work of scientists? Scientists undertake painstaking, necessary research to provide communities and their governments with vital, necessary information. Individuals and communities interpret and translate this information, often affectively. An organization of scientists studying carbon levels across Africa can list the progressive increase in temperatures across Africa over a period of years and calculate anticipated increases. An image based on this data may visualize the projected rise:"
"A glance reveals something dire based on the way we associate red with danger. Our course is oriented towards who lives beneath the surfaces of data and images that ‘draw a picture’ for us. We read for how communities and individuals explain and communicate their relation to the historical and changing environments. In other words, we attend to narration, in different forms—fiction, poetry, song, travelogue—to grasp how experiences are rendered comprehensible. There is a broad ‘where’ as well, and a fluid ‘when.’ ‘Where’ takes us into the portmanteau category of ‘The Global South.’ We bracket the scope of this category to focus upon specific places in the Indian Ocean, sub-Saharan Africa and diasporic African communities. ‘When’ permits us to think of time, the time of the world, the times of change and the times of aftermaths. Go into an archive, open a history book, a sacred text and you will encounter ‘endings.’ We enter British colonial archives to see how signs of ‘When’ also allows us to face an underlying dread that might be called a ‘sense of an ending’ and to see just how many such ‘endings’ have come to pass. This is how we enter the diasporic histories of environmental change related to colonialism and the enslavement and transportation of whose descendants live in the |
