Every person and living thing inhabits a climate-changed—and changing—world. So, how do practitioners, designers, researchers, historians, and writers make sense of it? How do we witness, notice, or respond to changing landscapes? How do we understand the past to make changes in the future? In writing methodologies woven throughout this semester, the course practices observation and relationship-building through writing with the living world. Moving through past, present, and future, our class navigates a way through and with the landscapes around us. Through key topics in contemporary landscape discussions, in addition to reading, analyzing, and discussing texts, the course includes several short collaborative projects involving additional site visits, short readings, and engaged writing workshops with leading scholars in which students are asked to participate. Pacing is critical in tuning to shifting landscapes—spending time in a place learning, visiting diverse locations, understanding the complexities between categories of place and time, and knowing nuanced language and words that describe or have described change in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The course assignments teach how to read landscapes and write about them, think about time and place together, how writing in and with history requires different modes of evidence and witnessing, and that history and writing are active conversations in landscape studies. Throughout the semester, we will practice and activate different ways to speak and write with varying audiences in mind—through the academic essay and beyond. After completing this course, students should have the skills to interpret and write about landscapes over time.
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