BA English Literature with Creative Writing

This course explores how the climate crisis has been communicated and confronted in recent and contemporary America. What cultural and political forces have helped and prevented Americans address the crisis? How has climate change been narrativized and negotiated through popular culture, (social) media and political discourse, and whose stories are being prioritized? Is capitalism compatible with a sustainable future? What is ‘petro-masculinity’ and how does environmental threat interface with the rise of authoritarianism in the US?

We explore the social inequities of the crisis -- along generational, race, gender, class and international lines. Equally, we explore pro-planet mobilizations, including youth-led and Indigenous resistance to oil pipelines. We consider the emotions elicited by the crisis (including our own), and how these can feed into climate action, changing norms and rising ‘post-growth’ politics.

Take this course if you want to learn about contemporary America and develop a deep and critical ecological literacy.

The aims of this unit are:

• To develop an interdisciplinary understanding of how environmentalism and climate change debates have developed and been framed in America since the 1970s
• To develop a complex understanding of the possibilities and constraints in communicating risks about climate change
• To engage with scholarship about climate change debates from a range of fields to produce well-synthesized and well-contextualised arguments 
• To introduce students to key environment-themed primary texts from film and political culture and to develop strong analytical skills to interpret them;
• To develop understanding of the neoliberal turn in America and how it has shaped debates about and responses to climate crisis

This class will be taught by 1-hour lecture and 2-hour seminar.  
Materials including seminar questions, clips, weblinks, bibliographies, exercises, and handouts will be posted on Blackboard each week. 
 

By the end of this unit, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a thorough familiarity with a range of environment and climate-related debates and cultural texts since the 1970s in America
• Show how the heated debates over the environment offer a portal into understanding certain key cultural, economic, and political trends in America since the 1970s
• Use and synthesize interdisciplinary scholarly ideas to develop a layered understanding of American environmentalism and conservative backlash

By the end of this unit, students should be able to:

• Think critically and make critical judgments about modern American environmentalism and  the “climate wars”
• Demonstrate a nuanced understanding of how discourses and policies about the environment are interconnected
• Identify and outline key problems and issues to do with contemporary American politics, society, and economics that are raised by the environmental crises
• Synthesize and analyse environmentalist and backlash texts, drawing reasoned conclusions

• Plan and execute independent research on environmental debates in post-1970 America
• Make good use of library, electronic, and online resources pertaining to the course
• Speak and write clearly about conflicting positions on climate change
• Engage in constructive debates with peers through class discussion and non-assessed formative presentations

• Retrieve, sift, organise, synthesise and critically evaluate material from a range of different sources, including library, electronic, and online resources
• Deliver non-assessed oral presentations in front of a seminar group
• Produce written work that collects and integrates evidence to test a critical argument
• Demonstrate good teamwork skills by acknowledging the views of others and working constructively with others

Julie Sze, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (University of California Press, 2020)
Joint Staff Report (2024), Denial, Disinformation and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change, House committee on Oversight; Accountability and Senate Committee on the Budget
Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth will save the world (Penguin, 2020) 
Victor Pickard, ‘The Misinformation Society’, in E. Klinenberg et al, eds, Antidemocracy in America: Truth, Power and the Republic at Risk (Columbia UP, 2019), 39-48
Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (Simon & Schuster, 2019)
JT Roane, ‘Plotting the Black Commons’, Souls 20.3 (2018): 239-66
Stephanie LeMenager, ‘The Commons’, in The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, eds Jeffrey Cohen and Stephanie Foote (Cambridge UP, 2022), 11-25 
Andreas Malm, How to blow up a pipeline: Learning to fight in a world on fire (Verso, 2021)  

Indicative popular cultural texts:
Youth v Gov (Netflix, 2022)
Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)
The Lorax (Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda, 2012)
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)
Cowspiracy (Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn, 2014)
Joni Mitchell, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ (1970)
Marvin Gaye, ‘What’s Going On’ (1971)
Childish Gambino, ‘Feels Like Summer’ (2018)
Hurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Buffalo’ (2024)