Game designer Jessica Creane hosts a Tea Party at the End of the World I was in Seattle with my daughter over Thanksgiving, looking at colleges for next year (she’s interested in studying theatre, so we also saw an excellent production of Little Women at the Seattle Met). Mostly we…

Discussing Memory of Water with The Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club “The only thing that separates us from dust is water. Water cannot be held in one place. It will slip through our fingers and through our pores and through our bodies. And the more shriveled we become, the more…

Discussing Night in the World with author Sharon English — A unique feature of the novel, Night in the World, is that it has a soundtrack embedded in it. The novel is about healing the separation that we feel from the natural world, the inherited alienation of modernity. The book has three main characters, and each follows their own path…

Thoughts on climate change imagination and solutions, inspired by the Beaubien exhibit at George Mason University The purpose of the Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club is to explore new conversations across higher education through reading climate themed fiction and short stories. Dr. Michael Svoboda, a member of the book club…

making a case for Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller — The question of Literature is something we circle around in the Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club. Specifically, what is literature? Is it what I say it is, since I’m a tenured English professor? Is literature in the eye of the beholder? Does literary merit depend on sentence structure? Is there…

Notes from the kickoff meeting of this year’s Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education The start of fall semester also means the start of the Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club for sustainability in higher education. We begin, for the third year, with…

an interview with Dr. Shanti Shrinivas — I’ve done over fifty interviews now in the Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education study and this live field notes blog. All the transcripts are waiting for me in MAXQDA, but I keep extending the study because I keep meeting amazing educators doing transformative teaching in college courses across every…

Recalibrating reality with authors from the climate fiction anthology Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene — The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club for Sustainability in Higher Education Last night I met a friend for a walk in the neighborhood. She had experienced a long illness, and I was gladdened to see her long swinging ponytail as she jogged towards me in the twilight technicolor of the Honolulu valley where we both live. I love a good walk-and-talk…

Interview with Dr. Tina Evans, Colorado Mountain College — I first encountered Tina Evans during the literature review stage of my doctoral dissertation, circa 2005, when I was devouring everything I could find about sustainability curriculum in higher education. I had started out in Educational Psychology, but switched to Educational Administration when my advisor told me that my proposed…