Planetary Futures – 3 credits

This course will be innovative in deploying a research-studio format to adjoin theoretical and fictive possibilities with empirical research in the present.  The course will be organized around visits to three sites organized through three themes that traverse the many temporalities with which we encounter each other and the earth: Extraction, Colonialism, and Speculation.

Each site will be accompanied by readings, historical information, and where possible interviews and conversations with community groups, labor organizations, and scientists.  These three sites will engage the past, present, and future of how we envision life.  These sites may include: 

Montréal is the home of monuments to the history of an earlier era when ecological understandings of the earth first emerged in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. These partial ruins, testify to visions and concerns about environment, globalization, decolonization, and energy. Monuments such as Habitat 67, the Biodome, and the Olympic Stadium offer testimony to both optimism over the possibilities for a new global habitat and new forms of human life, both on earth and in space, and rising concerns over environmental devastation, population increase, and geo-political terror. They also offer fertile sites to begin thinking upon, and speculating about, what a future habitat could or should look like ? How should these ruins and monuments be activated ? Are there still imaginaries we might gleam from them ? Are they best left to the past ? The class will engage with these designs and their histories and ask themselves, having encountered the current scale of geo-engineering projects, and the histories of colonialism and extraction that shape the environment,--what alternative worlds might we envision ? and construct ? and how might we begin to do so ?

Accompanying these three sites students will be given written and media materials from the following disciplines:

1. Fiction: Re-envisioning how we treat the earth demands thinking how we might envision alternative worlds. To this end, literary scholars will be leading sessions that examine the relationship between history of science and science fiction in the work of feminist, queer, African American and First Nation novelists and poets such as Ursula Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Octavia Butler and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. These readings will allow us understand the importance of notions such as «Umwelt », « biosphere » and « ecosystem » in the building and experiencing of alternative worlds.

2. Science Technology Studies:  Students will also be exposed to current work on the history and theory of architecture, urbanism, infrastructure and media.  We will be working with the Center for Canadian Architecture and historians and anthropologists studying green design and energy infrastructures and examining the social impact of geo-technical projects.

3. Speculative Design and Ethnography:  Students will engage with contemporary theories and methods in speculative design and urban planning and multi-modal ethnography. We will collectively engage readings that examine how to encounter and document phenomena that are happening at time and territorial scales beyond or outside the human sensorium.

4. Life and Earth Sciences: Students will be given background readings on ecology, the biosphere, and geology. They will be introduced to the history and science of the ideas, from Uexkull « umwelt » to the emergence of « ecosystem » in the 1930’s and to the idea of the anthroposcene introduced by geologists in the 1970’s.  

Canada, and Montréal in particular, has a special place to play in thinking about, responding to, and developing new methods by which to (re)think and respond to environmental catastrophe. The combined histories of colonialism, extraction industries, energy, as well as innovation in design, architecture, literature and technology offer a lens by which to examine how contemporary techno-scientific societies envision planetary futures.  Canada wavers between practicing ongoing environmental devastation and extraction and constructing itself on the imaginary of the pristine North and Arctic.

Montréal in particular, is an important territory for thinking about diversity, co-existence, and future habitats; located as it is between different colonial histories, French and British, and serving in the present as a major global center for the study and engagement with architecture and design it offers many opportunities and rich resources for cultivating thought and research. 

Interested applicants should submit a C.V. and a one page summary of their current research interests and why they wish to enroll in the course by May 10, 2017. The application should be submitted to:

Antonia Hernandez antonia@cordltx.org

Final decisions will be made by May 20, 2017

Consult the Tuition & fee estimates page for the current rates.

There is financial aid available for foreign students to cover tuition and transport, and students not living within the Montréal area will receive free room and board in Montréal. You must apply in order to find out if you are eligible. 

If you cannot find what you are looking for, please email us.

• Can I get credit for this course?

Yes, but if you are not registered at Concordia, contact us and we will work with you to provide you with all the information your home institution requires.

• What is the language of instruction?

 Course instruction language is English, but assignments can be submitted in french