Climate crisis and COVID-19 are a forceful reminder of the entangled lives of everyone and everything on the planet. This class turns to contemporary literature to think through ways of living together that exceed the imagination of Capitalism, an economic system that will only ever put profit before life.

We will think about issues of social justice, such as environmental racism and the use of Indigenous lands for nuclear mining, waste, or weapons testing. We will also think about stories that place non-human characters at their centre (some examples include: mushrooms, a piece of plastic waste at sea, the planet itself). And we will read a range of novels, poems, and short stories that use the imaginative potential of fiction to try and envision mutually sustaining modes of togetherness.