Teachin’ Books 2.6: Interview with Brent Ryan Bellamy, Moritz Ingwersen, and Rachel Webb Jekanowski / Teaching about Oil through Arts, Film, and Literature
In this first episode of 2022 (!!!), I’m delighted to be joined by Brent Ryan Bellamy, Moritz Ingwersen, and Rachel Webb Jekanowski, co-instructors of a course on “North American Petrocultures,” taught collaboratively and online through TU Dresden in Germany.
The core of this episode: How do you talk about oil in a Humanities classroom? What can studying arts and literature teach us about oil, energy, and environmental justice? How can we imagine different futures through the skills and creative capacities we build in Humanities classrooms? Check out the episode to find out more!
- “Teaching North American Petrocultures in Germany: Experiments in Collaborative Pedagogy,” co-written by Brent, Moritz, and Rachel.
- Check out Brent’s collection of “loanwords to live with,” An Ecotopian Lexicon, co-edited with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, as well as the teaching guide Matthew and Brent created for the book / Brent also recently published Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of U.S. Decline.
- Moritz is Assistant Professor and Chair of North American literature and critical future studies at Dresden University of Technology in Germany working on the transformative capacities of speculative fiction and art to help us grapple with the climate crisis and promote social change / Find more about his work here.
- Find Rachel at her website and on Twitter / Check out her recent work in a chapter entitled “Contested and Emergent Futures: Film and Energy Regimes of the Newfoundland Offshore” in Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures, a collaboratively-authored StoryMap called “Energy Amphitheatre: St. John’s Harbour” (with Fiona Polack and Danine Farquharson), and in the article “From Labrador to Leipzig: Film and Infrastructures along the Fur Trail.”
- How to Survive the End of the World podcast
- Elizabeth Miller’s interactive documentary The Shore Line/ Plus, an educator’s guide to the project, on “speculative futures,” written by Rachel.
- Indigenous Climate Action website / Indigenous Climate Action Youth Wellness Honorarium and Toolkit
Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram @TeachinBooksPod. You can also get in touch at teachinbookspod@gmail.com.
**The transcript for this episode, once available, will be here.*
Feature Image: “Fort McMurray, Alberta – Operation Arctic Shadow” by Kris Krug is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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