History/Theory II: Writing Landscapes

Catalog description

We inhabit a climate-changed—and changing—world. So, how do practitioners, designers, researchers, historians, artists, and writers make sense of it? How do we witness, notice, or respond to changing landscapes? In diverse writing methods woven throughout this semester, the course practices observation and relationship-building through writing with the living world. The course centers on key topics in contemporary landscape discussions, in addition to reading, analyzing, and discussing texts. 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 active course includes site visits, short readings, and engaged writing workshops with leading landscape scholars. 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—through the academic essay and beyond. After completing this course, students should have the skills to interpret and write about landscapes over time. This is an Academically-Based Community Service (ABCS) course.