EVENT RECAP | Earth Week: "Curriculum of the Anthropocene"
The “Curriculum of the Anthropocene” event kicked off the Tishman Center’s 2021 Earth Week programming. We invited four New School faculty members to discuss how the New School’s curriculum could be altered to better prepare students to deal with the Anthropocene - a geological time period wherein human activity has undeniably affected Earth’s climate and environment.
Two of the panelists, Dr. Mindy Fullilove (Professor of Urban Policy and Health) and Dr. Leonardo Figueroa Helland (Chair and Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management) had previously delved into this topic via their 2020 faculty grant project “Whole Earth Curriculum”. They were joined by Joel Towers (Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design, and the Director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center) and Dr. Arta Yazdanseta (Assistant Professor of Environmental Design and Technology in Architecture and Director of Parsons’ Master of Architecture). The Tishman Center’s 2020 Aronson Fellow Daniela Lam (and current student in Parsons’ AAS Interior Design program) moderated the conversation with insightful questions such as:
What knowledges do we accept or reject in higher education? In other words, who gets to be the teachers or design the curriculums? More importantly, who is excluded?
Let’s talk about where these changes can be implemented: which departments and schools? Are there professions that are too colonialist or capitalist to adapt to the needs of the Anthropocene?
What topics are too taboo or “woo woo” to discuss in higher education? (For example composting toilets.) How does this hinder our capacity for radical change?
Watch the full event on YouTube link below
“Us from the position of critical university governance.. what can we do to step away from those systems of epistemological authority and validation that have reproduced colonialiality, capitalism, and depeasantization which are directly accelerating the Anthropocene crisis?”