Contribution short abstract

This short contribution will share three efforts to integrate ‘critical hope’ at the University of Sussex. Firstly, a student/staff workshop series on critical hope. Secondly, teaching on modules linked to the University’s forest food garden. Thirdly, our new undergraduate degree in Climate Justice

Contribution long abstract

This short contribution will share three interrelated efforts to integrate ‘critical hope’ into teaching about the climate and environmental crises at the University of Sussex. The first was a series of critical hope workshops delivered by local practitioners and organisers in Brighton, UK. Invited speakers shared their personal activism journeys and motivations with students through storytelling and practical activities, such as weeding and recycling. The second is experiences of teaching on modules linked to the University’s ‘forest food garden’, an agroforestry plot on campus that was planted with students and whose design evolves each year with suggestions and planting from each cohort. The students on the module explore political ecology through food growing, as well as what it means to work with the natural world in a multigenerational project. The third is our new BA in ‘Climate Justice, Sustainability and Development’, which is converting learning from these and other projects into a new undergraduate degree. The degree is the first in the UK to focus explicitly on climate justice and has encouraged us to transform what we teach and how we teach it, to help students graduate engaged, happy and ready to change the world. These initiatives required a significant amount of work from an interdisciplinary team to overcome institutional barriers to innovation and to take advantage of small funding opportunities and spaces of dialogue and co-creation. I will share and reflect on these in the talk, with some ideas for recreating similar initiatives elsewhere and for ongoing interinstitutional collaboration.