Solastalgia: An Environmental Arts Workshop with Dr. Joshua Trey Barnett
Beyond Hops and Despair: Ecological Feelings at the End of Worlds, a workshop facilitated by Dr. Joshua Trey Barnett. In this workshop, students will explore ecological feelings beyond the cliched hope-despair dichotomy. Together, we will consider how ecological feelings like anger, apathy, care, fear, grief, joy, optimism, and rage influence our thoughts, judgments, and actions.
Free and open to students.
Solastalgia Full Event Description: Solastalgia is defined as “the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.” In this workshop and lecture series, scholar-artists Dr. Alissa Cherry and Dr. Joshua Trey Barnett will facilitate an exploration of solastalgia through arts-based methods that are attentive to the intersectional impacts of environmental crisis. From concerns associated with human-built urban space to the more-than-human impacts of climate change, the visiting artists will expand how we think about our changing relationships to the environment, how environments impact identity, and how we can cultivate a stronger sense of belongingness through ecological care.
Joshua Trey Barnett's Bio: Joshua Trey Barnett is the author of Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (2022) and the editor of the forthcoming Ecological Feelings: A Rhetorical Compendium (2025). An assistant professor of communication arts and sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, he is also the author of more than thirty scholarly essays and chapters in leading disciplinary and interdisciplinary venues in rhetorical studies and the environmental humanities. An award-winning scholar of what he calls the "rhetoric of earthly coexistence," Professor Barnett has lectured throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.
Presented by St. Lawrence University's Performance & Communication Arts Department and Music Department, with support from the Arts Collaborative
Questions? Please reach out to Dr. Tyler S. Rife at trife@stlawu.edu or Dr. Farrah O'Shea at foshea@stlawu.edu.