College of Fine and Applied Arts

Sustainability Storytelling Workshop 

February 16, 1-5 p.m.
Price Lake Room (201A), Plemmons Student Union 
Open to faculty and staff. Registration is required—email Laura England to reserve your seat.

What accounts for the gap between science and action on climate change, and how can stories reshape the climate narrative and galvanize action? Through his work leading the Climate Narrative Project, Jeff Biggers—celebrated author, journalist, historian and playwright—explores this question and endeavors to reach across academic disciplines, shape a new narrative on climate change and chronicle regenerative approaches to energy, food, agriculture, water and waste management, community planning and transportation. Biggers will explore this critical question with faculty and staff at Appalachian.

This professional development workshop is intended to help participants hone their sustainability storytelling skills as well as increase their capacity to guide students at Appalachian in developing their own such skills. Storytelling is relevant across the disciplines, and Biggers has worked with collaborators in a variety of media, including visual arts, film, radio, theatre, dance, spoken word and creative writing. We welcome all interested faculty and staff at this workshop.

About Jeff Biggers and the Climate Narrative Project

Winner of the American Book Award, Jeff Biggers is the author of six books of narrative non-fiction, including "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland," recipient of the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting. Biggers has worked as a journalist, playwright, historian and educator on sustainability issues across the US, Europe, Mexico and India. His stories have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and National Public Radio. Biggers has connections to our region and University; he authored "The United States of Appalachia," a book that has been used by classes at Appalachian, and was keynote speaker for the Center for Appalachian Studies conference in 2010. Biggers currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa's Office of Sustainability, where he founded the Climate Narrative Project.

The Climate Narrative Project is an investigative initiative: What accounts for the gap between science and action on climate change, and how can stories reshape the climate narrative and galvanize action? The project is a special media arts initiative in the Office of Sustainability at the University of Iowa, designed to reach across academic disciplines and chronicle climate solutions and regenerative approaches to energy, food, agriculture, water and waste management, community planning and transportation. Selected Fellows work with Writer-in-Residence Jeff Biggers on semester-long investigative projects, using visual arts, film, radio, theatre, dance, spoken word and creative writing mediums. Over the past year, the project’s theme has been climate justice, a topic of great interest to faculty and students on Appalachian’s campus.

Sponsors

These events are coordinated and sponsored by the Goodnight Family Department of Sustainable Development with support from the College of Fine and Applied Arts, the College of Arts & Sciences, the Office of Sustainability, the Center for Appalachian Studies, the Department of Theatre and Dance, the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership, the Department of English, the Department of Anthropology and the Humanities Council.