ANT443H1

Listen to the land; write like the water

How does the land talk? How do people talk about and with the land? This course looks at studies of language, communication, land, environment and climate. Topics include: media coverage of the climate crisis; greenwashing and attempts to ban misleading corporate advertising; Indigenous language revitalization, sovereignty and land/water protection; what it means when the law recognizes rivers as people and how rivers talk; ecolinguistics, and the language of maps. We will read ethnographies, poems, fiction and literary non-fiction that think through and with non-human kin (plants, rocks, water, creatures) in order to think about what a just world and well-being look like, for all beings (Mary Siisip Geniusz, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sabrina Imbler, Zalika Reid-Benta, Leanne Simpson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Anna Tsing, Joshua Whitehead). Come prepared to write—your water autobiography and to experiment with ways of writing about trees/water that are shaped like trees/water. Approximately one-quarter of the classes will be outside the classroom/on the land.