On 29 January, EEHN will host a reading group on Sarah Jacquette Ray and Jennifer Atkinson’s The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World (2024).
This will be co-hosted with CRITIQUE (Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought) and chaired by Lecturer in Global Environmental Politics, Michael Albert. It will take place in Chrystal Macmillan Building 3.15 at 3pm.
A message from Mike with guidance on readings is below.
The book is available via the university library. If you don’t have library access, you are welcome to contact Mike, or one of the EEHN conveners.
This event will be followed by our spring semester social, at the Royal Dick Pub at 5pm.
Reading:
The book has many excellent chapters, and most of them are fairly short (6-10 pages). I suggest we all read the 12 page introduction by Sarah Jacquette Ray and Jennifer Atkinson, and then each of us can read whichever chapters speak to our interests. We don’t need to read the same chapters to have a fruitful discussion – the goal is not just to have a close reading and critical evaluation of the text, but also to share and discuss different teaching strategies, ideas, challenges, and experiences in ways that can stimulate further reflection and creativity on how we teach about the ecological crisis.
That said, a few chapters that I found particularly interesting (based on my interests) were April Anson’s “Practicing speculative futures”, Sarah Kanouse’s “Prompts for feeling-thinking-doing”, Peter Friederici’s “Overcoming the tragic”, and Michelle Garvey’s “Leveraging affect for climate justice”. Feel free to read as much (or as little) as you have time for!
Michael Albert