Environmental Rhetoric and Advocacy

Catalog description

The focus of this course will be environmental rhetoric and advocacy. Environmental rhetoric refers to the intersection of language and thought about the ecological environment, including how nature and environmental have historically been constructed in human culture, how the environmental issues we face today are bound to those historic constructions, and how we can use language to advocate for healthier and more sustainable environment futures through writing. The course is organized into three units that reflect this focus: environmental past, environmental present, and environmental future(s). Students will draw from analytic and methodological traditions in the humanities and English Studies to understand environmental history. They learn to apply rhetorical framing, including narrative framing and metaphoric framing as a lens for interpreting contemporary environmental texts, and we will learn genres of advocacy writing to participate in creation of a more sustainable environmental future.