Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture (390-0-24)

Topic

Telling Chicagoland's Climate Stories

Instructors

Jayme Elizabeth Collins
jayme.collins@northwestern.edu

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 4-410: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

Telling Chicagoland's Climate Stories

Chicago, as well as the broader Midwest region, has often been cast as geographically shielded from climate change-induced environmental destabilization. And yet the city and its environs are still affected by the impacts of climate change in increasingly extreme weather patterns, subsidence, and other environmental upheavals, leading the city to declare a state of climate emergency in 2020. How do the stories we tell about place shape how we understand and respond to climate change? In this project-based course, students will be immersed in diverse approaches to telling stories of climate change in a primarily U.S. context. Throughout the quarter, we will examine a wide range of research-driven, place-based stories of climate change across media, from a documentary film about the hottest August in New York City to a StoryMap about climate resilience in the Ohio River Valley and nonfiction writing and journalism about how landscape changes exacerbated by climate change are transforming life for different urban and coastal communities. Alongside our discussion of such storytelling projects, students will work in teams on a quarter-long collaborative project about how a place or community in the Chicagoland area has experienced, addressed, or imagined climate change. Teams will be formed based on student interests in a location/topic and in a particular storytelling medium. Project-based work will require independent travel to off-campus locations.

Class Materials (Required)

Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore [ISBN 9781571313812]

Daniel Sherrel, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World [ISBN 9780143136538]

Other course materials will be available on Canvas at no cost.

Class Attributes

Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration is reserved for Environmental Policy students.