Crisis and Storytelling in the Age of Climate Change

This is a Complex Problem course and is open to FRESHMEN only. You must enroll in both EESC1720 and ENGL1733. The realities of a changing climate, including intensified extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and strengthening heat waves and droughts, are already being felt by frontline communities around the world. This course focuses both on hearing stories about climate change as told by climate writers, scientists, and members of frontline communities, and telling these stories ourselves. We will examine storytelling as it works across mediums and genres from literature to scientific data visualizations, and consider what it means to write an essay, produce a graph, create a podcast, or make a film. Students in the course will read, watch, and analyze examples of climate storytelling, broadly defined, and produce their own personal essays, infographics, podcasts, and/or films. Some questions we will foreground throughout the semester are: How do we communicate the science and the human impacts of the climate crisis? Whose ways of knowing and lived experiences do we privilege? How can the stories we tell move society towards just climate solutions?

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4.39 / 5

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4.26 / 5

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4.14 / 5

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3.98 / 5