UNM Ecoliteracy

English

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Eng320.001: Writing About Food and Culture

Course Description: 

"Food as a cultural, social, and rhetorical trope speaks to us across communities, place, and time. Good food feeds the body and the soul. The purpose of this class is to create a community of environmental thinkers and to cultivate opportunities for considering our roles as citizens, activists, scholars (of place) through the study of local and global food cultures. The rich literary and rhetorical legacy of food culture and environmental discourse will be examined through diverse textual artifacts (and genres) including the everyday rhetoric of menus and recipes, film, poetry, speeches, essays, letters, creative nonfiction, food reviews, and the multiple forms of food rhetoric in public culture. This course will also focus on literary and rhetorical texts representing the ecology of place with special emphasis on New Mexico food cultures and environmental justice movements in relation to land and water rights, food cultivation, and biodiversity depletion. Participation in field exercises, guest lectures, and out-of-class learning environments will be integral to this course. Our reading list will include environmental texts within and beyond the Southwest region. The study of environmental rhetoric calls attention to the means by which activists, scholars, and citizens represent and advance their interests as individual agents and collective entities on behalf of diverse communities. Environmental writing is social action; creative and symbolic; dynamic; context-dependent; intrinsic to human communication; inherent to all forms of social organization. These conceptual framing principles (as topoi) will inform our analyses of place, citizenship, agency, and arguments about the multiple uses of cultural/environmental resources—particularly the circulation of water resources and the cultivation and distributions of food resources. Capstone Project will include the construction of student Food Blogs (using field research and qualitative research methods) toward the production of an online portfolio of reflective writing, field reports, film analyses, food reviews, interviews, and a multi-modal team presentation."

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Eng413.001: Scientific, Environmental and Medical Writing

Course Description: 

"Theoretical and practical studies of writing in the sciences. Addresses writing for both popular and professional audiences."

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Eng418.001: Grant and Proposal Writing

Course Description: 

"This course explores the art of raising money with a focus on how to raise funds for non-profit organizations. You will meet with fund raising executives and foundation directors from Albuquerque. You will study winning non-profit proposals to understand the successful moves they make. You will learn how to research, locate, and evaluate RFPs (requests for proposals) to find the best match between a project and a prospective funder. You will practice how to persuade a client or funder to support you, and/or your project. "

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Eng420.002: Writing With Class Tropes: Rhetoric of Wine

Course Description: 

"We are rhetorical beings, shaping and influencing our environments with (social, physical, spiritual, political, economic, etc.) through language and symbol. Francis Bacon succinctly defined rhetoric as the “art of applying reason to the imagination for the better moving of the will.”  And who can resist Bacon? Nothing moves us to action or imagination better than a good trope! Tropes are more than rhetorical schemas and stylistic devices. Tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) together with their “kissing cousins” Topoi and Enthymemes (or the more popularly recognized manifestation known as “Memes”) function as forms of Epistemic Rhetoric by mediating and constructing knowledge and the quasi-logical universe of human communication. These complex and abstract concepts become far more palpable and pleasurable to contemplate when paired with a good glass of wine!"

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