University of Cambridge, Pembroke College

This course introduces some of the diverse topics around sustainability and the future of the environment. The focus in the first half of the course is to identify and explore various global issues that currently need to be addressed to ensure sustainability. Topics such as population, migration, health, cities, water, food, and the digital age are included. Economic and biological aspects are not covered in any depth even though they too are complementary and equally essential in providing robust ways forward. Any student with interests in these areas would be warmly welcome to participate and to contribute. The second half of the course focuses on the need to provide sustainable energy, and alternative energy sources are introduced since decisions currently are being, and will need to continue to be, taken to replace conventional fossil fuels.

This course is dedicated to the practice of writing as literary experiment: a radical inquiry into the possibilities of mind and language and, by implication, an exploration into the nature of difference and interdependence. As such it regards creative writing as an extension of critical reading and seeing. Through a series of workshops this course invites students to move through a number of short literary exercises, some of which orbit existing models, while others are freshly imagined. These are culled from the study of the methods, processe, and techniques of a range of writers and artists that cut across time and discipline, and are as different from one another as Virginia Woolf, Basho, Frank O'Hara, Paul Cezanne, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Hélène Cixous, Amiri Baraka, Patrick Keiller, Charlie Parker, Raymond Queneau, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jackson Pollock, and Allen Ginsberg.