The majority of our work in my Departmental Honors English seminar was centered around this cumulative project. We read an abundance of different novels and texts this quarter, all connected in some way to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and all tied back in our discussions to the idea of the Anthropocene. Each week, we wrote reflective discussion posts about the material we'd read that week, and I decided to compile the posts I'd written alongside metacommentary as my final project combining all that we'd learned. We published our collective projects as a class to the platform Manifold. My entry is linked below, but the entire project is available to explore.
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This was one of two big projects we worked on for my first of a series of two Departmental Honors seminars in English. This class was focused around studying literature through the lens of the Anthropocene, the human-created geological epoch. I took this photo on an excursion to a local park with my roommate, and felt that it exemplified my experience of living in this moment, particularly with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic. My reflection on the image I submitted for class is below. I chose this photo to exemplify my experience of living inside the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is an era defined by human-induced problems that reverberate out to the world at large, and there’s no example of that I’ve experienced more powerfully and intimately than that of the global COVID-19 pandemic. I remember people making jokes in the early days of the pandemic about how “nature was healing” while humans were stuck inside, hiding away from the disease that rampaged in the world beyond their walls – and it was true that plants and animals were once again making homes, however temporarily, in the places that humans had abandoned. Human action had driven them out of those environments, but human action also could remedy the harm previously caused. It reminded me of how connected every part of the Anthropocene is. Each and every human life is connected to so many others in ways we previously didn’t even consider – and also has connections to the trees and the sky, the birds and the bugs. The world is a system of connections, and I think the global pandemic has reminded me of this fact more than ever before. The protests in June and the attention they brought on racial divides and both the social and environmental repercussions only emphasized this realization. My hope is we can emerge from this pandemic and period of separation hyper-aware of the way our actions and movements through the world affect so many others, humankind and beyond.
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