Goddard College is a progressive education private liberal arts low-residency college with three locations in the United States: Plainfield, Vermont; Port Townsend, Washington; and Seattle, Washington. The college offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs. With predecessor institutions dating to 1863, Goddard College was founded in 1938 as an experimental and non-traditional educational institution based on the idea of John Dewey that experience and education are intricately linked.Goddard College uses an intensive low-residency model. First developed for Goddard's MFA in Creative Writing Program, Goddard College operated a mix of residential, low-residency, and distance-learning programs starting in 1963. When it closed its Residential Undergraduate Program in 2002, it switched to a system of 100% low-residency programs. In most of these, each student designs a unique curriculum. The college uses a student self-directed, mentored system in which faculty make narrative evaluations of students' progress as they fulfill their program's degree criteria. Goddard offers a Bachelor of Arts (BA), Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Master of Arts (MA), Master of Fine Arts (MFA), along with several concentrations and Licensures. It enrolls approximately 364 students, 30% of whom are undergraduates. It employs 64 faculty and 50 staff.The college is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education.
In recent years, there has been growing criticism within environmental studies and sciences (ESS) regarding the environmental racism embedded in the institutions that train future environmental professionals and leaders. The environmental canon centers and perpetuates Eurocentric epistemologies in the voices, perspectives, lived realities, and values of environmentalism. We suggest an approach to ESS that begins with students. Our applied approach goes beyond “diversifying” ESS and strives to co-create a discipline that centers the histories and lived realities of minoritized students. This article highlights the work of students, faculty, and staff who are transforming traditional approaches in ESS so that it may realize its emancipatory potential. We suggest that inclusive sustainability can transform student outcomes, sense of belonging, and encourage the identity formation and self-exploration of students, opening pathways for environmental engagement. This approach has the potential to transform the discipline, diversify the field, and produce new kinds of environmental leaders to fill future environmental careers that have yet to be imagined.
Hinduism in America: A Convergence of Worlds, by Jeffrey D. Long. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. xviii + 285 pp., £67.50 (hb), £21.59 (pb). ISBN 9781474248464 (hb), 9781474248457 (pb).
Every body contains multitudes, but no body is immune to the ideology of oneness: one true self, one sexuality, one gender, one vision of the world, one true God. For many who identify (or who have been named by others) as transgender, queer, and nonbinary, the refusal to fit within the illusion of one set of sex and gender expectations has been met with violence and suppression. While the myth of oneness is a powerful story that shapes the contours of our societies and our selves, it is not the only myth. Performances, fictions, rituals, and theologies can transform current realities. The(y)ology: Mythopoetics for Queer/Trans Liberation is a manifesto for artists, teachers, theologians, clergy, and activists looking for ways to resist rigid paradigms of gender, sexuality, self, and the sacred. In these pages, we are called to tell new stories about who we are and how we relate to each other within our ecosystems. The myths discussed wrestle with and transform the complex mytho-histories that have birthed and, often, harmed us. No story comes from nothing, and, more radically, perhaps no story is fully irredeemable. In The(y)ology, feminist philosophies join with trans poetics, literary theory with liberation theologies, drag performance with kabbalah, ecologies with pornographies, and ancient theater with queer autobiographies. However ambitious its scope might be, The(y)ology is fundamentally about encouraging us all to think playfully and to play thoughtfully with the mythologies that define our lives.
There is increasing awareness of gender disparity in relation to the negative effects of climate change. With that increasing awareness comes greater focus on how national and international policy frameworks are not sufficiently gender-responsive and do not sufficiently consider the disparity between genders. Climate change has a greater impact on those sections of the population that are most reliant on natural resources for their livelihoods, and these sections are often from poorer groups. At the same time, those same sections of the global population usually have the least capacity to respond to natural hazards, such as droughts, landslides, floods and hurricanes. The majority of the world's poor are women and consequently, those women commonly face higher risks and greater burdens from the impacts of climate change. Where women are denied equal participation in decision-making processes and labour markets, these inequalities often prevent women from contributing meaningfully to climate-related planning, policy-making and implementation. Governments and international organisations need to develop new frameworks, policies and legislation, particularly in relation to the provision of cleaner energies which involve cooperation with women to ensure that realistic solutions are introduced and implemented.
