The Field Guide to Lost Futures is a collective project from Literature, Culture, and the Anthropocene (ENGL 4E03), a Winter 2021 seminar offered in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a course about loss. The Anthropocene is a term that describes the current geological age, characterized by the dominance of human influence on the planet\u2019s systems, including climate change, deforestation, proliferation of toxic wastes, and mass extinctions. The Anthropocene is a period characterized by losses already endured and many anticipated losses on the horizon. Much writing and thinking around the Anthropocene projects into a future radically remade by loss. Losses of ecosystems, relationships, lifeways, and stories have been unequally created and are inequitably distributed. Race, gender, sexuality, class, and species have profound effects on the varying exposures and vulnerabilities of different communities and geographies to climate change and other impacts of human-induced planetary changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Together, we will think through the radically divergent causes and experiences of loss from a diversity of perspectives, locations, and scales. The term Anthropocene was coined by white male chemist, Paul Crutzen, in 2000, but he is not the first and far from the only person to theorize, grasp, and mourn the losses mounting from human-changed ecosystems. Throughout the semester, will look at contemporary explorations of ecological loss, but will also examine practices of identifying, grieving, and attempted managing human-caused losses across the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our work will cluster around loss in three key sites: land, species, and futures. We will approach loss as active processes\u2014wherein lands, species, and futures are made lost by activities such as extractive capitalism, colonial dispossession, ecofascism, and environmental racism. We will also examine a wide range of responses to loss, including affective (grief, hope, and rage), narrative and arts-based (elegy, monuments), and policy (platforms, reparations).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our efforts to identify and interpret loss across multiple registers will culminate in a collective and collaborative digital humanities project: The Field Guide to Lost Futures. Addressed to near-future audiences, the Field Guide is part time capsule, part memorial, and part speculative experiment. By projecting into the future, we will think about how the Anthropocene and the many losses in the wake of its catastrophes might be remembered. Students will each create an entry to the Field Guide that identifies something on the cusp of or at risk of loss in our current, situated experience of the Anthropocene at McMaster University in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As we move through the course and develop the Field Guide, we will encourage each other to ask: How do we sense, experience, and document loss? What are the political potentials of grief and mourning? How can we engage loss from a range of perspectives, including nonhuman? How do we tell stories of loss that are not only damage-centered and that do not cast destruction and decline as inevitable processes? Which losses might be necessary for different futures to emerge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nate Blakeslee, The Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West<\/em> (New York: RandomHouse, 2017).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sarah Broom, The Yellow House<\/em> (New York, Grove Atlantic, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha (editors), Octavia\u2019s Brood: Science Fiction Stories fromSocial Justice Movements<\/em> (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2015).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Anson, April. \u201cNo One is a Virus: On American Ecofascism,\u201d Environmental History Now<\/em>, 21 October 2020, available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Burtynsky, Edward, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Toronto: Mongrel Media, 2019), available streaming via McMaster Libraries<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. \u201cOn the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anthropocene,\u201d ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies<\/em>, vol. 16, no. 4 (2017): 761-780.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Miller, Elizabeth. \u201cThe Losing Coast,\u201d Statesider<\/em>, 17 May 2020, available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Estes, Nick \u201cFighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context,\u201d Wicazo Sa Review<\/em>, Vol. 32, No. 2, Fall 2017, pp. 115-122<\/p>\n\n\n\n How to Save a Planet, \u201cBlack Lives Matter and the Climate,\u201d 24 September 2020, available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kanngeiser, Anja and Zoe Todd. \u201cFrom Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study,” History and Theory<\/em>, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2020): 385-393.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keeler, Kyle. \u201cSettler Theft and Indigenous Resistance in the Kleptocene,\u201d Edge Effects<\/em>, 08 September 2020, available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ladner, Keira. \u201cGoverning Within an Ecological Context: Creating an AlterNative Understanding of Blackfoot Governance,\u201d Studies in Political Economy<\/em>, Vol. 70, No. 1 (2003), 125-52.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Liboiron, Max \u201cRecylcing is Like a Bandaid on Gangrene,\u201d The Atlantic, 13 June 2019, available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Little Bear, Leroy. \u201cThe Historic Buffalo Treaty of September 2014,\u201d in The Last of the Buffalo: Return to the Wild<\/em>, edited by Harvey Locke (Banff: Summerthought, 2016), 84-87.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mirzeoff, Nicholas, \u201cVisualizing the Anthropocene,\u201d Public Culture<\/em>, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2014): 213-232.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nixon, Rob. \u201cThe Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea,\u201d in Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene<\/em>, edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1-18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Peeples, Jennifer, \u201cImaging Toxins,\u201d Environmental Communication<\/em> Vol. 7, No. 2 (2013), 191-210.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Purdy, Jedediah. \u201cEnvironmentalism\u2019s Racist History,\u201d The New Yorker<\/em>, 13 August 2015, available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, \u201cThe Brilliance of the Beaver: Learning from an Anishnaabe World\u201d CBC Ideas Podcast, 16 April 2020, available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, Ol\u00faf\u1eb9\u0301mi O. and Beba Cibralic, \u201cThe Case for Climate Reparations,\u201d Foreign Policy, 10 October 2020, available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. \u201cInterlude: Tracking,\u201d\u00a0 “Disturbed Beginnings: Unintentional Design,\u201d and \u201cThe Life of the Forest,\u201d in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of life in Capitalist Ruins<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 137-144, 151-152, and 155-163.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Van Dooren, Thom. \u201cMourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World,\u201d in Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction<\/em>, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2014), 125-144.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wells, David Wallace, \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth,\u201d New York Magazine, 10 July 2017<\/p>\n\n\n\nCourse Readings: Articles + Other Materials<\/h2>\n\n\n\n