Teaching Environmental Justice and Early Modern Texts: Collaboration and Connected Classrooms

Abstract

Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe offer innovative approaches to teaching the embodied and collective history of human impact on the planet through early modern texts and contemporary ecofeminist theory. Combining Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” (a way to understand environmental destruction over long periods of time) with an ecofeminist approach that “interrogates mutual forms of subjugation,” the authors stress how humans inhabit collective environments with other human and nonhuman entities. Their intersectional teaching strategy reflects this attitude by elevating collaborative scholarship, forging links between distinct classroom communities, and empowering students to historicize environmental problems, from water quality to wildfires. Students collaborate across geographic and institutional differences, and with scholarly efforts like the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, to develop a heightened sense of both place and global interconnectedness.