Dr. Deb Sinha, Environmental Studies
Radical Hope in the Age of the Anthropocene
The purpose of my participation in the 2023 2022 Valley and Ridge workshop was to launch the process of developing a new course I am teaching in Fall 2023. The idea of the course, titled “Radical Hope in the Age of the Anthropocene”, was provoked by my personal conversations with Dickinson students (mostly from the Environmental Studies program) and some faculty members who I found to be very depressed thinking about the future of the environment and our species. I borrowed the title and the idea from the course from a group of educators who were motivated to design and prepare this course material due to similar experiences (see ).
I joined the workshop hoping to tap into the vast pool of knowledge, academic backgrounds and experiences to help me brainstorm ideas of pedagogy, accumulate potential resources and activities that would make the course successful. While I knew that the theme of sustainability would be interwoven through the course, I was also aware that given the long and torturous legacy of “sustainable development/growth”, it would not form the foundation of the course. As part of the course, the students would be exposed to the socio-economic-historical context of climate change to set the stage for thinking about thriving in the Anthropocene future. At the end of the course students should have a broad understanding of the conditions and mechanisms that have created the current impasse regarding preventing and remediating climate change, and the limitations of technological fixes. Students should also have clarity about essential changes necessary in the realm of social, political and economic systems if we want a hopeful future.