This course introduces students to literary and cultural texts that raise environmental awareness, drive climate action, and imagine alternative futures. Students will investigate themes of sea level rise, ocean garbage, overdevelopment, resources extraction, and urban waste at the intersection between environmental justice and social justice issues of race, migrant worker rights, Indigeneity, colonialism, and other minority livelihoods. Through a diverse range of fictional stories, films, artworks, and popular cultural texts, students will explore literary and cultural forms that go beyond realist conventions, including science fiction, magical realism, fantasy, apocalypse, eco-art, and Indigenous futurisms. The course will take students on an imaginative journey to a diverse range of geographical locations while keeping a focus on the environmental literature and socio-economic changes in Asia and Hong Kong. Students will gain an understanding of the unique capacity of the arts in engaging with the emotional, ecological, and aesthetic experiences of life under climate change. In particular, the course will engage students in experiential and service learning to cultivate reflective and participatory projects on doing environmental humanities.
