Asking how we Care

This last week in class we mostly workshopped and discussed our isms maps. I was out on Thursday because I was preparing to guide the Climate Conversations event of the Environmental Affairs Symposium. It went beautifully, I feel! And I look forward to collecting feedback to hear what it was like for participants.

I’ll do a brief update on my isms map in this post, to document its changes over time. Here is its current version:

What we refer to as “isms” are just the concepts that fill out this map, like urbanization/counter-urbanization (in section “Modern”) or Green democracy/governmentality (“Public sphere”).

There’s a lot yet to do in figuring out, via this map, how to do interdisciplinary with coherence.

For instance, the green arrows almost suggest to me that the Public Sphere is my central point (not Meaningful Action). And also, there are concepts (such as feminist ethics/virtue ethics) that have huge amounts of literature I have basically never touched, which is daunting. So I don’t want to pick too many isms that overload me with new knowledge I won’t be able to adequately grasp in short time. That’s a big challenge of interdisciplinary weaving—finding the gaps that do need to be filled, and filling them wisely.

Another way of sketching it could be this!:

A lot to figure out, and this will come more clear during this next week of consultation, class, readings, and turning in assignment.