Global Eco-Cultures

Module code: ML3040

This module explores how writers, artists and filmmakers across different languages and cultures engage with place and with ecological and environmental issues as a means of reflecting on the present and imagining the future in the Anthropocene. By engaging with key critical issues in the environmental humanities and ecocriticism (such as environmental and climate crisis, extinction and critical plant studies), we will discuss how the selected authors, media and texts articulate current anxieties about the environment and the place of human and non-human beings on earth, and intertwine with current political and social concerns, while providing a space of belonging, imagination and hope for the future. The module has a global remit and tackles questions of eco-translation. It addresses the UN sustainability agenda and includes carbon literacy accreditation for students. The module is assessed via a project presentation and coursework essay.

Topics covered

• depictions of environmental and climate crisis  
• posthumanism and plant-thinking  
• sense of place/sense of planet 
• walking and displacement 
• landscape aesthetics 
• dystopias  
• eco-translation  
• sustainability and carbon literacy