Workshop 5: Field Notes on Natureculture

Leaders: Hannah Hopkins (Georgia State University) and Jennifer Clary-Lemon (University of Waterloo)

Climate loss demands renewed strategies for attending to and composing with
environs-in-flux. We might think of these as strategies for witnessing climate change:
ways of knowing and responding to the embodied, multiscalar valences of climate crisis.

This workshop invites scholars in environmental rhetoric, rhetorics of science, and
scholars with interest in rhetorical field methods to work with one such strategy: noting,
the practice of observing, responding to, and affectively dwelling within a field.
This workshop invites participants to practice noting as interventional and inventional, a
dynamic and active composition practice that emplaces writers in specific and evolving
material ecologies. Our workshop will include time spent gathering together for
discussion about the practice of noting, followed by two field excursions as a large
group. The first fieldwork session will take place at the Louisville Nature Center,
followed by a second fieldwork session in the immediate urban environment in
Louisville. In both fieldwork sessions, participants will experiment with a range of noting
technologies in order to take notice of how “built” environment also enrolls ostensibly
wild spaces. As a group, we’ll think together about the ways that our rhetorical practices
are bound up in wild, shifting ecologies. At the close of this workshop, participants will
come together to create field guide zines that render some of their takeaways from their
two fieldwork experiences.

Participants need no previous with field noting or zine production to participate in this
workshop — simply a willingness to creatively and collaboratively engage with our
environments in Louisville.

Note from the organizers:
As per previous workshops, there may be pre-reading and pre-work required before June. Your leaders will reach out to you some time after registration with additional details.

There will be no A/V equipment available in this workshop. The workshop leaders encourage participants to bring charged devices with their preferred hardware and software pre-loaded, especially for any participants who have accessibility needs. You should indicate any accessibility needs on your registration form.