Crucial Contexts: Sustainability

Rhetoric and the Quest for Sustainable Communities: Oceanic Islands: Peter Goggin, Department of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Professor Goggin argues that rhetoric is a fundamental aspect of creating material sustainability and social justice. Oceanic Island communities comprise his case study for that argument for two reasons. First, islands are environmentally fragile, relatively contained in terms of culture, population, and ecosystem, and generally non self-sustaining in terms of social and economic infrastructure. Second, mainstream urban and mainland societies tend to impose limits on islands through assumptions about them as small, rural, or tropical. Through rhetorical analysis of local texts on sustainability, combined with first-hand observations, Goggin argues for a rhetoric of place--in this case, "island-ality"--as the first step in sustainability.

Literature, Environmental Justice, and Sustainable Culture: Joni Adamson, School of Letters and Sciences, Polytechnic campus

Professor Adamson's talk will focus on the relationship between environmental justice activism around human rights, seeds, and food crops and the explosion in literary writing about food. That relationship has transformed literary studies both inside and outside of U.S. contexts. At the same time, such writing has dramatically intervened in the public's understanding of concepts such as "wild," "domesticaed," "native," and "exotic." Literary works by such writers as Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Pollan, and Gary Paul Nabhan, have also been crucial to international debates surrounding transnational trade, immigration, indigenous human rights, and food democracy. Such works help the public critically re-evaluate the meaning of "sustainability," "sustainable development," and "humane sustainable culture."