Wild Ways: The Nature of Wilderness, Wild-ness and Wild Being(s) in the Anthropocene

This seminar interrogates changing ideas of nature on an urbanizing planet under the intertwined crises of climate change (global heating) and biodiversity loss (extinction) – now known as a global polycrisis. Grounded in transdisciplinary research across the humanities, ecology, and design, the course will use visual-spatial analyses, scientific reasoning, critical reflection, and artistic media to engage diverse ways of thinking, sensing, knowing, relating to and being with-and-in wilderness and wild-ness. Seminar contributions will facilitate and encourage un-learning colonial myths of wilderness through exploring intersectional and intercultural epistemologies of nature, and the primordial human connection to the diversity and abundance of other species, or simply, life on earth. In contemplating what it means to be wild in the Anthropocene, the seminar posits a relational ecological perspective, and examines critically the concepts of co-existence, entanglement, and kinship as interspecies relationships and their implications for more-than-human design applications.