Dr. Eva Copeland, Dickinson, Spanish and Portuguese Studies
Migration Literature & Sustainability
I attended the Valley & Ridge workshop to help me think about the connections between migration literature and sustainability and to develop a unit introducing students to literary ecocriticism. For my project, I decided to revise a portion of my course, SPAN 299: Reading and Thinking ºìÐÓÖ±²¥app Texts, which is a required course for our majors. This course introduces students to various techniques and approaches for reading and interpreting a wide range of texts, with the topic chosen by the professor. My class focuses on contemporary migration narratives in Spanish literature and film. The workshops helped me recognize that migration is closely linked to core concepts of sustainability, particularly those related to inequality and social justice.
For my project, I designed a unit to help students: (1) understand the connections between sustainability and literature, (2) explore literary ecocriticism as a framework for text analysis, and (3) engage with Spanish environmental cultural studies, which emphasizes the inseparability of ecological and cultural processes and studies cultural production through that lens. The Valley & Ridge workshop provided me with valuable tools and ideas for incorporating sustainability into future courses beyond this specific project.