Epilogue - “Everyday Micro-utopias”

Summary

“Everyday Micro-utopias” recapitulates themes from Climate Change, Literature, and Environmental Justice through an examination of pedagogy as a form of what Rebecca Solnit terms “building paradise” in the classroom. I draw on my experience teaching a class on climate change over the past several years, where my students and I remain in the presence of the unbearable grief of climate change, displacements, relocations, and extinctions. The course is a space to imaginine collective responses to climate change that carve what Nicolas Bourriad calls “micro-utopias” within the status quo. I offer a notated syllabus with readings, assignment notes, and the narrative that binds the course together. In the final pages of the epilogue, I turn to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth speculative trilogy, which imagines revolutions of the enslaved that end the world and make possible a new beginning anchored in the archeology of past insurrection.