This year we will kick off the first and second cycles of the Livable Futures course at Ohio State University with students from any discipline. Here’s the course description, welcome one and all! In this creative research-based and experiential learning course, students will engage in creative inquiry at the intersection of our bodies, our technologies, and our ecologies.
Responding to the urgency of current planetary conditions, this course fosters creative solutions for survival under planetary conditions of unpredictability and crisis. Students are guided in creating individual and collaborative socially engaged research projects that are supported by faculty research. The course is supported by the resources of Livable Futures, a multi-year artistic research and public practice project co-directed by Norah Zuniga Shaw and generating creative responses to planetary crisis and uncertainty.
Livability instead of sustainability emphasizes social justice and an ecological ethics re-centering who survives and who gets to thrive in our communities—human, biological, and artificial.
Spring 2023
This cycle of the Livable Futures learning community and creative laboratory will bring students into conversation with local and international activists and artists through local field study (attending exhibitions and performances together, meeting with artists, site visits) and engage resources in the Livable Futures Podcast and Idea Archive.
We will center Black and Indigenous artists, practices and knowledge while engaging deeply with each of our personal identities and intersectional positionality in society. We will use the tools at hand to create our own forms of disruption and activism through artistic intervention and invitation.
This is a research-based studio exploration, beyond our shared texts and groundwork together, students will be guided in determine individual or collaborative research threads.
Learning through Research
Research-based teaching is emergent. We ask questions together and discover possibilities by engaging in various methods of creative inquiry. In addition to reading, listening, discussing, watching, journaling and writing (!!) other activities will be research driven and therefore will emerge as our shared and individual research interests emerge.
Learning through events involves preparing prior to an event, attending, engaging with the artists when possible and documenting or synthesizing your learning through movement, audio, video, visual traces and/or writing.
Our shared modalities throughout the semester will be visual journals and short interpretive essays / arts criticism.
Visual journals and written interpretation both foster critical thinking skills (comprehension, application, reflection, and inquiry) employing a range of learning modalities that are documented through image and text. Audio is also an option.
Special opportunities and funding from the Ratner Award for excellence and innovation in teaching
We are teaching this class with support from the Ratner Award for teaching that I received last year. This means we have funds to support your ideas and the final exhibitions/events we determine as well as opportunities that emerge along the way. Students are encouraged to propose projects and suggest uses for funding related to the course and the larger Livable Futures initiatives throughout the semester. This is a special one time offering and a great way to have an impact. Dream big!
Learning Communities
What we are creating here is a creative research community; we’re coming together to make progress on a set of ideas that are important to each of us and to use the social support and input of a diverse community of practices to do so.
We will also use carefully devised intersectional feminist methods for supporting creating and moving ideas into the world. As a result we will also share and comprehend work and working practices in and across fields and worldviews.
This can sometimes be uncomfortable especially when it involves systems and approaches that are unfamiliar. We will engage with this discomfort when it arises with generosity and curiosity. We will all emerge from this term with a new set of tools in our toolkits as artists, citizens, scholars, and as teachers for co-creating livable futures.