Skills
Sessions
Considerations for a Sustainable Diet with Andrew Canete
In this session, we will discuss some sustainable concepts that you can implement surrounding one's food consumption! We will also share ideas for spreading awareness and better alternatives for a healthy, sustainable diet! There will also be an optional cooking component at the end of the session wherein participants will be guided through cooking a sustainably-conscious (and dietary-inclusive) dish!
Dealing with Climate Anxiety: A Research Driven Exploration into an Emerging Phenomenon with Abby Mazurek
In this session we will be exploring a relatively new challenge in the fight for global climate justice: climate anxiety. Climate anxiety refers to feelings of stress, uncertainty, and fear surrounding the looming threat of global climate change (Wu et al., 2020). This skills group session will begin by exploring scientific publications on the emerging issue of climate anxiety. We will discuss the nuanced nature of this particular strain of anxiety, at once adaptive and maladaptive, collectively shared and individually experienced, existential and biomedical (Clayton, 2020). We will go on to examine some research-derived coping mechanisms to deal with feelings of climate anxiety. Throughout the session, we will reflect on how this research can be applied to our own lives through the creation of personalized resource sheets.
A Low-Waste Menstruation Conversation (all bodies welcome!) with Daniella Mikanovsky
In their lifetime, people who menstruate use over 11, 000 pads and/or tampons, all of which end up in landfills. With the recent popularity of the ‘low-waste’ movement, reusable menstruation products are becoming increasingly available. In this session, we will discuss the reusable alternatives that exist, their use, and practicality. We will further explore the low-waste movement in context of climate action and the need to consider everybody in our advocacy and mitigation efforts. All bodies are welcome!
The Sustainable Student with Sophie Marchetti
From meal plans to dorms to commuting costs and COVID, we will explore the possibility of an eco-education both as an individual and as an institution. This session will involve a discussion and brainstorm regarding the abilities and unique mindset of an interdisciplinary student in sustainable decision making on campus. A summary of the ideas shared in this session will be shared amongst C2C attendees in an infographic developed by the host.
Useless Art: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Trash with Sharang Sharma
Before I start, I should note, this is not a session on the 2003 film The Room, but on trash in all its various forms and mediums. Trash is that object which, emptied of all that which elevates it into being something useful, is reduced to something even below dysfunction: that is, something not functional at all. Trash is the excess that we throw away, hoping to never see again, and trash is also that thing that is slowly filling up larger and larger portions of our oceans. Useless things may be out of sight and out of mind, but they are never really gone, and in our blind focus on productivity and use in this era of late-stage capitalism, there is no room for the useless. In this skills session, we will be listening to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and looking at trash as an aesthetic object, as something that we can create art of and write poetry on. We’ll begin by watching a short clip where Zizek discusses the need to learn to see the beauty in trash, and from there we will look at examples of art that does this, then finally creating our own art (whether visual art, poetry, music, etc.) finding the beauty in that which is useless.
