About Dr. Susie O’Brien -> View Profile
The interview was conducted by undergraduate research assistant Fyza Azam with members of the Racialized Ecologies team.
Fyza Azam: To begin, could you tell me about a course you teach that addresses racialized ecologies?
Susie O’Brien: Yes. It’s a first-year cultural studies course called “Studying Culture: A Critical Introduction.” The course addresses the entanglement of environment and culture and emphasizes the material contexts of cultural production. The course asks how material contexts shape culture, and how cultural ideas that come to be understood as common sense are produced and resisted through images, texts, institutions, and everyday practices. It also examines how those ideas are refracted through dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and so on. A key concern is how we think about nature and culture, recognizing that we inhabit a physical world alongside other humans and non-humans, and that our cultural ways of understanding and struggling over how to live in that world are always political. Because culture is invariably political, the course is also concerned with what we should do in the world, recognizing that we inhabit it politically. As the syllabus puts it, the course aims to “illuminate the material circumstances that shape what counts as common sense in contemporary life and limit our imagination of what is and what’s possible, while also identifying and activating currents of contradiction, struggle, and resistance that might lead to more just futures.” Cultural studies, in this sense, is an explicitly political project, and racialized ecologies are part of that.
Fyza Azam: What do you most hope students will get from the course?
Susie O’Brien: I have a list of learning objectives from the syllabus:
- Students engage generously and critically with their classmates’ ideas in writing and conversation. The class is a collaborative endeavour, and there is a lot of emphasis on process and being in the space together.
- Students draw on theories and concepts from cultural studies and learn what the tools are.
- Students reflect on being a user and a maker of culture.
- Students reflect on their location, experiences, attitudes, beliefs, habits, and motivations, as students and as inhabitants of a specific place or set of places, to reflect on what it means to be here.
- Students initiate a creative intervention in a contemporary debate or problem and draw on the course concepts to make that intervention.
Fyza Azam: How have you organized this course? Is there a rhythm or a narrative that shapes it?
Susie O’Brien: Yes. The rhythm moves from “What are we doing here?” to “What can we do?” The first unit in the course is “What are we doing here?”, and then in brackets, and “what are we doing here?” By “here,” I mean the university, Hamilton, this particular bioregion, and then moving outwards. So the first thing we do in the course is an exercise that my colleague, Gina Zyrowski, devised. It’s called “Where Do You Know From?” It replaces the icebreaker exercise that many of us have traditionally done in class, such as “Where are you from?” The exercise “Where do you know from?” acknowledges that we all have these thick networks and place-based experiences that shape what we know. If we think about what those are, it validates that we all come into the room knowing some stuff. We might know things from previous education, from family members, or from experiences living in different places. The exercise is to introduce ourselves to one another, based not on identity, but on the contexts of our knowledge and what we’re all bringing into the room.
It starts with that, and then we do readings that focus on the concepts of home and habitat. Here we talk about the land acknowledgement, which situates us in this place that has a particular history and particular colonial history, but that also situates us in relation to particular watersheds and land formations. Then we read an essay by Raymond Williams called “Culture is Ordinary.” It attacks the idea of capital-“C” culture as this rarefied kind of universal set of elite texts or art forms to say that culture comes out of where we are, which is both a history of labour in a particular place, but also, particular landforms. Raymond Williams was writing about Wales, where he grew up. We also talk about what we’re doing here at the university. Here we talk about pedagogy, including Leanne Simpson’s essay “Land as Pedagogy.”
The first bit is, what are we doing here? Then the second bit is, who is “we”? Here we talk about the ways in which we’re enlisted in certain narratives of belonging and exclusion. We talk about the myth of meritocracy, which suggests that wherever we end up, it’s because we are deserving or because effort translates into particular outcomes. Then, we go into a section called “Hopes and Fears and Other Feelings,” which encourages self-reflection. We talk about moral panics; we read a piece by Stuart Hall and a bunch of other cultural studies writers called “Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order,” which talks about how the concept of mugging was basically invented as part of a racialized panic.
Then we do a reading about not being disgusted by insects, so, as with feelings that are essentially caught up in policing, asking, who belongs in our community and who doesn’t. We talk about more constructive ways of channelling feelings, so we read Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger, Women Responding to Racism,” and we read Sarah Ahmed on “Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness.” Then we read a piece about climate anxiety, “What to do with Climate Emotions.”
We read pieces that encourage rethinking what counts as environment, and what it means to inhabit a home, which is a culturally infused thing, but also a habitat that we share with others, and how those things are tangled together. Then from there, there’s a section called “Room to Manoeuvre,” which is thinking about “Okay, so here we are, what can we do in this space?” We talk about cultural studies’ concepts of strategy and tactics, ableism, and different kinds of movement. The final section is “Another World Is Possible.” Here we talk about what it means to Indigenize in the university, and to what extent that is possible. We also discuss theories of change and read a poem by Rita Wong titled “Epilogue: Letter Sent Back In Time From 2115.” We talk about speculating on different futures and the goal of the course. The trajectory/the narrative is to move from reflection to hope and action.
Fyza Azam: That sounds really interesting. I really like the way that the course is set up, where we start with the reflection, and then the hope, and action. Could you tell me about some of the readings or other texts you assign? How have students responded to them?
Susie O’Brien: Yes, Nanjala Nyabola’s “In A World on Fire, What Do We Owe Each Other?” is a short reading about thinking globally. It’s interesting because she talks about how, as an African writer, she is often expected and invited to write on things that only affect Africa, and how problematic that is. It’s connected with whose authority we recognize on certain subjects. Who is allowed to talk about what, with what kinds of authority? So she talks about the obligation to think globally, and that it means seeking out voices that might not be foregrounded, so it’s about being a responsible environmental citizen, but thinking about what the global politics of that look like.
Kai Cheng Thom’s “Righteous Callings: Being Good, Leftist Orthodoxy, and the Social Justice Crisis of Faith” is about call-out culture and about a tendency on the left to police one another’s thoughts and how that is damaging. The sentiment “I hope we choose love” is about thinking generously and capaciously, while also thinking critically. I have an Indigenous colleague, Rick Montour, who came in and spoke on the Thanksgiving Address, and what it means to be in this particular Dish With One Spoon Treaty Territory. Janice Vis’s “Unsightly Relations: A Meditation On (Not) Being Disgusted by Insects” is really, really good. So, I think part of the emphasis on what we are doing here, at the university, and in Dish With One Spoon territory is asking students to think those things together, and what it means to work responsibly in the university, in this particular place, and to situate our knowledges. I’ll also send you the “Where do you know from” exercise. I just tweaked this exercise a little bit to emphasize land, as well as other kinds of contexts of knowing.
“Where Do You Know From” Exercise: https://www.maifeminism.com/where-do-you-know-from-an-exercise-in-placing-ourselves-together-in-the-classroom/
Fyza Azam: What types of assignments do you have?
Susie O’Brien: Okay, so the main assignment for this class, I have called it an “Intervention.” The goal of the “Intervention” is to do something other than an essay, and it’s to get students to use tools from the course to engage in a way that is geared towards public accessibility, with questions related to course concepts. The ultimate goal is the creation of a small project in relation to a contemporary problem, and the assignment focuses on both the final product and the process of identifying a problem or a question, an intervention, and a target audience. It sounds like a weird, pretentious name for an assignment, but the word “intervention” is a way of getting at the idea in cultural studies that the study of culture should never just be an academic exercise; it should aim to participate consciously and actively in the world. It uses tools from cultural studies to engage with social and political life outside the classroom. Students did podcasts and videos. People made zines, and even though the constraints of this first-year undergrad class meant that they couldn’t share them publicly, the goal was to create something as if for a public other than our class: like, what would an intervention in the world look like?
Fyza Azam: Is there anything else you would like to tell me about the course?
Susanna O’Brien: This interview has been useful for thinking about how to incorporate racial ecologies more into this class. We talk about race quite a lot and about environment, but thinking through race, environment, and culture together, the course could do a better job of it. In our project, we talk about genre—poetic, documentary, and speculative genres—and what different genres can illuminate and what they may conceal or don’t show very well. I think that could be part of this course as well. It does end speculatively, with a poem that makes us think, “What can this say that a documentary can’t say?”
Fyza Azam: That’s all the questions I have for you today. Thank you.