Instructed by:
- Dr. Winnie Lai Man Yee, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong
- Professor Rick Dolphijn, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University
Key Takeaways
CLIT 7026 Special Topics in Eco-criticism aims to help students become familiar with the complexities of 21st-century crises, how they are reflected in social, political, and environmental uncertainties, and how they lead to civic action. This course is a unique transdisciplinary, transnational, and inclusive program. Students will engage in close reading groups in which seminal essays and core debates of eco-criticism will be introduced. Online discussions will be encouraged to ensure swift exchanges between students in the Netherlands and Hong Kong. Students will also be equipped with critical thinking skills in the process of attending online workshops run by local artists in Hong Kong and the Netherlands. A collaborative creative project will promote cross-cultural exchanges and motivate students to search for ways to involve themselves actively online and offline in research.
Distinctive Features
- A unique transdisciplinary, transnational, and inclusive course that brings together academics, artists, and students from the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities to articulate critical issues of the environment.
- A focused research course on the challenges and opportunities of the deltas provides, bringing together perspectives from the global north and the global south.
- A brand-new initiative that combines online teaching and physical exchange, which facilitates the understanding and exchange of ideas across four cities around the world, including the deltas of Maputo, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands.
- Demonstrate an understanding of main ideas, concepts, and debates in eco-criticism, environmental studies, and the lives of the deltas in the online close reading groups
- Identify, differentiate, and explicate environmental imagination, discourse, and debatable aspects as they appear in creative arts in the workshops with artists from Hong Kong and the Netherlands
- Develop skills in critical analyses necessary to appreciate creative relations between the arts, humanities, and the sciences
- Encourage appreciation of diverse cultural practices and contexts within a global frame, with emphasis on formulating a strong peer-to-peer learning community with motivated students from different universities in the final creative assignment
| Week 1 | "Noticing" Close reading of topics related to the technology and life in the Netherlands (coordinated by the Netherlands) |
| Week 2 | "City and Urbanism" Close reading of topics related to land and class in the Maputo city region (coordinated by Maputo) |
| Week 3 | "Agency"
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| Week 4 | "Climate Justice" Close reading of climate justice in Rio (coordinated by Rio) |
| Week 5 | "Green Colonialism"
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| Week 6 | "Technoscapes" Close reading of topics related to infrastructure in Europe (coordinated by the Netherlands) |
| Week 7 | "Citizenship" Close reading of topics related to sanitary governmentalities and waterborne diseases (coordinated by Maputo) |
| Week 8 | "Environmental Racism" Close reading of topics related to environmental racism and disaster in Brazil. (coordinated by Rio) |
Exchange
Between 12 June and 22 June: Six international students (Utrecht and Rio) visited Hong Kong
Assessment