Food for Thought

with Gina Kirsten

Through essays, guest speakers, field trips, and in-class cooking, this hands-on English class looks at the role food and agriculture have played, and will play, in human life. Students explore current and historical perceptions on the consumption of food, those who work to provide it, and how cultural, political, and economic attitudes and policies influence what and how we eat. This course is also an elective in our sustainable agriculture and food systems minor.

Renewable Energy and Sustainable Design

with Scott Grinnell

Professor Grinnell wrote the book for this sustainable community development course, integrating principles of green building with renewable energy systems. You’ll apply classroom ideas with your own creative visions to create dynamic design projects addressing environmentally-sound buildings and an array of renewable energy opportunities and applications. “My goal is to help students feel empowered to address future challenges, particularly climate change,” Grinnell says.

Great Lakes Water Wars

with Peter Annin

This course delves into the history of political maneuvers and water diversion schemes that have proposed sending Great Lakes water everywhere from Akron to Arizona. Using a case-study approach that examines these various water projects, the course culminates with a focus on the Great Lakes Compact, a legal document designed to keep Great Lakes water inside the Great Lakes Basin. This class is an elective in the water science emphasis of our Earth science major.

Diversity and Organizational Development: Impacts and Opportunities
Jennifer Kuklenski
As modern societies become more diverse, the call for greater inclusion within organizations is getting louder. Many organizations have rushed to diversify without fully understanding the implicit and explicit levels of diversity, the complexity of social identities, and the hidden and often unintended ways differences between members of in-groups and out-groups can lead to social exclusion. Diversity and Organizational Development helps current and future leaders develop their diversity competency.

Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment
Kyle Bladow, Jennifer Ladino, eds.
Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism proposes that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, narratology, and neuroscience.

The Great Lakes Water Wars, 2nd Edition
Peter Annin
Peter Annin writes a fast-paced account of the people and stories behind the upcoming battles facing our great lakes. Destined to be the definitive story for the general public as well as policymakers, The Great Lakes Water Wars is a balanced, comprehensive look behind the scenes at the conflicts and compromises that are the past-and future-of this unique resource.

The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear
Brian Tochterman
As a sense of crisis rose in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s, no city was viewed as in its death throes more than New York. Feeding this narrative of the dying city was a wide range of representations in film, literature, and the popular press—representations. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials used this fear of death to press for a new urban vision.