Grappling with Despair in the Classroom: An ASLE Roundtable

At the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference this year, I organized a roundtable on climate justice pedagogies, and brought together some powerful instructors and one student to talk about how to deal with the depressing effects of studying environmental crisis and injustice.  Told to "save the planet, kill yourself," and observing our leaders undermine environmental and social justice, how do we expect the next generation to find a reason to live?

One of my students depicted his response to my class, ENST 295: Power, Privilege, and the Environment, with this fabulous Valentine's card: "This is your brain on ENST 295."

The roundtable extended a conversation prompted by SueEllen Campbell’s pre-conference ASLE workshop on teaching climate change at the 2015 conference in Moscow, ID, as well as LeMenager, Hall, and Siperstein’s new groundbreaking resource, Teaching Climate Change in the Environmental Humanities.  That superb volume doesn't outright engage affect theory, but every single piece speaks to the challenge of overcoming students' despair.  In my experience, students' affective response to the material I teach about structures of power and environmental injustice can become a barrier to learning.  I wanted to hear how my colleagues were addressing this challenge.

Covering experiences teaching in places from Georgia to Singapore, in a diversity of institutions from conservatory to land grant university to technical college, and to undergrads in majors ranging from music to engineering to composition, not to mention environmental studies, I gathered six participants who prepared talks responding to the following questions:

1. How are you dealing with students' eco-grief, environmental despair, and even nihilism when they learn about climate change & environmental justice? 
2. What is a justice-inflected pedagogy, and how might it add to climate change courses? 
3. What is an affect-focused pedagogy, and how might it add to environmental or climate change courses?
4. How does a climate justice pedagogy add to teaching climate change?
5. What do you do with "hope" in your classes?
6. How does the Trump era shape your pedagogy?

Other themes emerged, too, and I was glad to hear respondents talk about acknowledging that different students will respond to the material in different ways depending on their positionality.  In other words, students who have been experiencing environmental injustice in their lives are not shocked by the content.  I took note that I need to address this much better in my pedagogy.  

Jenn Ladino, an associate professor of English at the University of Idaho, opened the roundtable with some provocations and guiding questions. She asked, how can affect theory help explain emotions related to environmental change and loss, including new affects that are emerging in/with the Anthropocene? How is affect transmitted across scales, from individual to global and vice versa? What are the prospects for empathizing across species, and across temporal scales?  She argued that we need to attend to a wider range of affects in texts and classrooms, as well as some new ones that are emerging in the Anthropocene: climate grief, Anthropocene anxiety, solastalgia, even irreverence and humor, which I'm excited to learn more about in Nicole Seymour's book-in-progress, Bad Environmentalism.  

Jill Gatlin, faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, argued that a justice-inflected pedagogy requires enabling students to understand their positionality and privilege vis-à-vis the unequal distribution of climate change consequences. However, emotional reactions to explorations of privilege may range from defensiveness to denial to guilt.  Jill described a course she taught that asked students to consider climate change's effects on a place that they are connected to, in order to make it more real to them.  As musicians, Jill's students also explored what "action" in response to climate change and injustice would mean. 

Robert Melchior Figueroa, an associate professor of philosophy at Oregon State University, argued that "academic cowardice" in this moment makes the assumption that students can't handle the truth.  He insisted that students can handle the emotional intensity of how terrible things are, and that a new vocabulary of affect is crucial for working through this with them: environmental guilt, environmental shame, environmental paralysis, environmental anger, environmental complacency, environmental complicity, and environmental honesty.  Importantly, Rob talked about the importance of exploring students' environmental identities and heritages for grappling with the doom-and-gloom with them.
 

Independent scholar Melissa Sexton provided a beautiful description of how she integrated this material "sideways" in composition courses with technical college students. She should run workshops on this. In contrast to Rob's provocation for us to get more honest, Melissa talked about the need to not alienate students.  She proposed that the concept of the Anthropocene is an easier one for students to engage without getting polarized into the tired old climate change sides.  She can get students to think critically about complicity, justice, technology, ethics, etc, with conversations about the Anthropocene, whereas climate change as a concept can shut down students' ability to think and learn.

Matthew Scheider-Mayerson, assistant professor at Yale-NUS Singapore, talked about the challenge of teaching climate change in that country.  In Singapore, a wealthy illiberal democracy with no recent tradition of social movements, he finds that the pedagogical path that had succeeded in the United States – guiding students from complacency to awareness to outrage and a desire for engaged citizenship and political action – was far less successful.  He argued that instructors model affective responses, intentionally or not, and vulnerability, grief, and honesty become important in the classroom. The typical posture of cautious optimism is not the ideal orientation, he argued.  Like others on this roundtable, he suggested that we sit with the grief with our students, even as we find ways for them to channel their desire to solve problems, act, etc.

 

Finally, a recent graduate of the Environmental Studies program I lead at Humboldt State, Carlrey Arroyo Delcastillo, spoke from her experience as a student of color in a predominately white institution.  It was this talk that really prompted me to think about the ways in which the affective journeys of the white students in my classes dominate my own design of the class.  Attending to white fragility, shock at their privileged complicity, apathy about whether they can/should really save the world as they had hoped, and tears over all the evil in the world, can be silencing to students who have different affective responses to the material.  Carlrey talked about her journey toward a social justice approach to environmental activism, and ended with something like, "it's ironic that I went into environmental studies because I hated humanity, and now my work is based on my love for it."  I'm pretty sure there wasn't a dry eye in the audience.  And what a way to end-- on love.

The room was packed. People were lined up against the walls.  It indicated to me that instructors of environmental and climate justice are desperate for pedagogical tools to help students grapple with this material.  My colleagues and I are worried about our students-- the next generation of people who are inheriting this mess.  

How do you deal with emotion in your classrooms? 

Resisting Burnout is Revolutionary: Marisol Cortez at ASLE

I just heard the most amazing paper at the ASLE conference ever! Marisol Cortez, of deceleration.news, talked about the importance of slowing down our feverish reactivity to "multiplying crises" of environmental injustices, climate change, the ascendance of white supremacy, etc.  (Update: You can find her paper now published here).

She and her partner, Greg Harman, have experienced debilitating mental health problems, prompting them to leave their secure jobs for the precarious lives of freelance writers and activists.  She talked about the "disabling assumption" that our "bodies can sustain constant conflict, constant crisis."  All action-- chasing fire after fire, working, working, working to resist-- reflects a logic of capitalist extraction, a "production imaginary" undermining capitalist growth ideology, that affects corporate life for sure, but also academia and even grassroots activism, Cortez bemoans.

In contrast, she said, deceleration, degrowth, is a praxis of environmental justice.  The "logic of 'not-enoughness' is disabling to activism."  In other words, the overwhelming feeling we all have to increase the amount of work we do in response to the increased urgency and onslaught of crises is not sustainable to the "marathon" (Bullard's word) of environmental justice.

Thinking of the "pace of life" expectations around productivity--either in the corporate sphere or the grassroots sphere, and deceptively so, perhaps even worse in the latter given our historical moment-- as "disabling" is so brilliant. Cortez just blew my mind.

Finally, Cortez rejects "resistance" because it nurtures conflict-- the very conflict that disables us.  It "internalizes not-enoughness", while "deceleration rejects our exhaustion with resistance," which can be "boring" and "joyless."  Drawing on Gloria Anzaldua, Cortez purposes instead that "inner work, public acts," is a better mantra to live by.   I love that Cortez engages disability studies' critique of productivity in this paper, politicizing self-care and mental health as a praxis of environmental justice.

She cites the new Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era anthology as a key work; in it, an essay on "care" -- especially care of the self-- argues (as I understood Cortez's summary to say), that we should resist the debilitating forces of production, exhaustion, not-enoughness, action, extraction of our labor, acceleration, accumulation, and the emotional and affective results of these values (despair, nihilism, impotence, depression, etc).

Although the feminist in me bristles a bit when somebody tells me that "care" is the antidote to capitalism, but I take her point: I never feel I have the time it takes to do the care of myself, my family, critters, and my friends and loved ones. I resent those humans and non-humans that demand care from me, because I am compelled, torn to do the important work so needed to resist!

But what Cortez is saying, I think, is that I needn't feel so conflicted, and that if I prioritized care, I might care for myself as much as the other critters that need care, instead of cutting self-care in favor of hard work and care of others.  In short, Cortez's paper prompts me to  rethink the complexity of "care", especially as the discourse of "self-care" surfaces in a post-election moment.

I was struck by the arguments about temporality implicit in Cortez's paper.  Cortez talked about the work of environmental justice that is invisible even within the counter-hegemonic work of justice, the slow, daily, monotonous work that is taboo and uncool in the fight to "resist": self-care, writing, thinking, creating, tending to relationships, tending to our joys and loves. She says that our unwillingness to "count" this work as valuable is a reflection not of our selfishness or our inadequate commitment to justice, but rather of the capitalist logic of extraction and productivity.

If Rob Nixon's theory of "slow violence" helps make visible the forms of violence caused by environmental injustices dispersed over time and displaced across time, then perhaps what we might call "slow activism"-- which may not even look like activism-- surely is the response to surviving it.

4 Tips for Bringing Undergraduates to Professional Conferences

In the environmental humanities, as in the humanities more broadly, involving undergraduates in my research is challenging.  I write articles and books, and it's difficult to outsource any of that work.  One of the ways humanists can professionalize students and integrate them in our research is by introducing them to our professional organizations and networks.  Bringing students to conferences has been the main way I've achieved this.

In my role as Vice President of the Association of the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), I was part of a great group (Stephen Siperstein, Sarah Wald, Salma Monani, Kevin Maier) that drafted guidelines for faculty seeking to bring undergrads to our conference.  Below, I summarize some key tips for faculty who want to bring students to conferences but don't want to hand-hold while conferencing. I go to conferences to immerse myself in my intellectual community, not to chaperone undergrads.  I've found some good strategies:

Here I am at ASLE in Moscow, Idaho in 2015, with Humboldt State undergrads and my baby.  The four students who came were Ivan Soto, Noemi Pacheco-Ramirez, Paradise Graff, and Hannah Zivolich (not pictured). 

1. Pre-Mentor
Prepare your students en masse prior to the conference and be transparent about your availability at the conference itself.  I hold information sessions that I require students going to ASLE with me to attend.  I explain what conferences are about, walk them through the program, talk about etiquette,  talk about how presentations go, brainstorm what they hope to achieve there, build confidence, and answer loads of questions.  Even better, plan a "mock-conference" panel of those students so they can practice their presentations.

2. Spread the Love
Drawing on ASLE's fabulous graduate mentoring program, which pairs grad students with seasoned scholars to mentor while at the conference, I asked ASLE's Graduate Student Liaisons to pair my undergrads with grad student mentors to hang out with at the conference.  I needn't be the only mentor to my undergrads; in fact, they benefit from widening their mentoring circle in the field. It also expands their network, and taps them into the student scene at the conference.

3. Funding
My institution tries to support any efforts to engage undergrads in my research, through Research,  Scholarly, and Creative Activity Awards.  I apply for these to help support students attending the conference, and ask students to apply for other travel awards through the college. We don't have a lot of money at Humboldt State, but we can rustle up $500 or more.  This can be a deal-breaker, and it's certainly the most challenging part of taking students to conferences.

4. Follow-up
After the conference, get together to download.  Encourage students to follow up with emails to people they met and may like to contact in the future about grad school, or other kinds of advice or mentoring. Post-mentoring is really important too; get feedback about what they gained and observed.  Collaborate with them to write up something for whatever media source announces your institution's achievements.  Use the students' testimonies to recruit majors by posting pictures of everybody together at the conference.  These efforts may generate longer-term payoffs for the work it took to take them.

I have taken undergrads to ASLE for the past four conferences, and I get great pleasure from enabling this kind of professionalization.  The field benefits too; these are the next generation of thinkers who will push us in new directions.  It's synergistic in my workload as well, as it combines my professional service and teaching.

And it provides further evidence to my students that I'm not the only wacky academic out there who thinks the humanities is crucial for saving the planet.  I may be the only one at my institution, but when they see what all these amazing people in my field are doing, they are more keen to join the environmental arts/humanities resistance.