Université catholique de Louvain / Literatures in English
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I have been working on issues of decolonization in literature for many years and I have realized that it goes hand in hand with degrowth/ethics of the limits.
Today, I include these dimensions in my classes, which address the political function of literature, in its themes, forms, aesthetics, and ethics. I created a new class that focuses on the issues of gender and sustainability in utopian / dystopian fictions. It has become a site of debate and alternative teaching methods.
I approach sustainability in all of my literature courses, either directly or indirectly. The works of numerous scholars and artists keep inspiring and destabilizing my way of thinking (Haraway, Latour, Sarr, Demos, Atwood, Hegeland, McCarthy, Callenbach,…).
My readings, discussions with my husband, friends, students, colleagues, and children keep challenging me on a daily basis, inviting me to engage with regeneration and limits.
Imposing myself limits does not only allow me to share resources and bring me closer to other living beings, it also to leads me to create other lifestyles (I cycle every day), to think (through art and other modes of expression), to eat (with new plant-based recipes!), to visit (always closer to home – last discovery: the loops of the Meuse), to cultivate (to understand and welcome what the earth gives us).
I must thank our local citizens’ cooperative Quatre Quarts for making this journey a creative and social discovery, bringing us closer to others in my own town. It is a place of exchange, connection, celebration, crafts, local food, collective intelligence that shows how the transition movement is an ethical movement “together”. It involves other ways of feeding us bodily but also spiritually, socially, and mentally. It’s an amazing challenge!!!
Originally posted 2018-07-31 07:12:43.