“Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing,” writes Jenny Odell in How To Do Nothing. Everything vies for our attention: important news, exciting updates from friends, cat videos, advertisements. How could we possibly do nothing when there’s always something? This course investigates how and why doing nothing might be the most important thing to do at a time when it feels like there’s so much to do. If we really want to do something in our lives and in the world, we might need to begin by doing nothing, resisting or refusing the immediate demands on our attention and energy to refocus and concentrate ourselves toward more meaningful action in common with human and non-human others. We will experiment with different forms of writing that avoid just doing something and instead cultivate attention and intention. In dialogue with Odell’s book, this writing will investigate resistance and refusal with writers including Melville, Thoreau, and M.L. King; attention and ecology with Robin Wall Kimmerer and Masanobu Fukuoka; and political imagination with Rebecca Solnit and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
- Instructor of record: Joel Schlosser