Teaching Natural History to Art and Design Students

I will discuss and share student work from Natural History: Local, Global, Analog, Digital, a seminar at RISD organized around two primary goals: 1. To engage critically with natural history as a literary and visual art form... [ view full abstract ]

I will discuss and share student work from Natural History: Local, Global, Analog, Digital, a seminar at RISD organized around two primary goals: 1. To engage critically with natural history as a literary and visual art form and with its history as a scientific practice. 2. To collaborate on projects and experiments that employ digital and analog methods for analyzing, interpreting, archiving, networking, curating, and creating visual and literary works of natural history. The course is organized around trips to research libraries, archives, nature labs, and field sites, modeling a deeply interdisciplinary, collaborative, project-based form of humanist education that combines critical engagement with the aesthetic and rhetorical features of natural history as a multimedia genre; historical understanding of Euro-colonial and indigenous folk science and ecology, discourses of race, and the nature of European imperialism; and active production of natural historical art and knowledge.