So, those of you who were following this project saw that around the beginning of summer last year, I "disappeared." With the recent election, I’ve been writing a bit on my own facebook page, but I decided not to put those pieces on here, as they didn’t fit the tone of my work on EudaimonEatery.
Starting today, I’m returning to this project with the same (intended) regularity as I started it: 2 blog posts a week with updates to the project. For the foreseeable future, those journal posts will be on Saturday and Wednesday afternoons.
I’ll take the rest of the space, here, to explain where I went and what I’ve been up to:
Since my last post, I’ve moved from Austin, Texas to Phoenix, Arizona. I’m now at Arizona State University continuing my graduate education in rhetoric, but also because ASU heavily emphasizes sustainability research that (as y’all know) I value quite a bit. Working with the wonderful people here has let me continue my work with classical rhetoric and provides several opportunities to bring community or environmental research and rhetoric together.
One example of this synthesis is with my teaching. I’m teaching freshman composition courses (ENG 101 and ENG 102) through frames of ecocomposition and urban-citizen interaction. In the next two weeks, I’ll go into much greater depth about my teaching strategies and philosophy. But in brief sum, I get to work with incredible minds and teach sustainable ecologies for writing and civic practice.
So why this moment? I could have (and honestly tried to) return to this project many times in the past year, but with teaching, moving, and being in graduate school for the first time, I struggled to find time to write anything for “myself.” But with everything that’s been going on in the news, with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whitehouse’s non-recognition of environmental concerns, and the incredibly wide civil unrest across America, and especially in my home town, I see now that sustainability and compassion for the environment falls to us. I can't return to silence, despite my deep frustration. Community management and sustainability have overnight become local issues. So where the Federal administration chooses to ignore sustainability, communities: neighborhoods, businesses, and towns, have to get to work.
I think that means we need to create “Local Sustainable Literacies.”
And in the coming months and years, I’m dedicating this space to create, teach, and share what that might mean, with all of you.