Impotence into Agency

Each of my blog posts, published or not, has started with a coffee in hand and my peers’ completed posts open in front of me. Despite the debilitating feeling of writing honestly for an audience, I gain some courage and perspective from the thoughts and ideas of all the Environmental Studies authors who have shared to this blog before me. For some the prescription of hope may seem too confining to share to this space and that this platform perhaps doesn’t lend itself to pessimism or confusion. With critical hope negativity in a way is essential for understanding intersectional issues. I personally derive just as much hope, if not more, from this vulnerability. There is something reassuring and almost validating knowing that we are all going through this life altering process in one stage or another. Sarah Ray identifies this process in her Affective Ecocriticism Manuscript as the affective arc of Environmental Studies curricula. My own experience can be compared to Ray’s claim that the “ENST degree is some kind of 12-step program, with its own arc of affects, moving in stages from idealism, lost innocence, shame, denial, grief, apathy, optimism, and then, I can only hope, agency to work against diminution” (1). Though described here as an almost linear process, I understand these stages to be part of a cycle that ebbs and flows with new knowledge and growth. Every day with this material I feel like I teeter between inching closer to clarity and falling farther from tangible solutions. Accepting and incorporating emotion as part of my response to this curriculum is what has allowed me to adequately deconstruct my former understanding of the world to try moving forward in a way that feels meaningful. 

I started the semester vocalizing my intentions for being vulnerable and as the work load increases and I want to isolate myself in my shell I am reminded of the value of the network I am a part of and the collective effort in which I play only my own role. 

Prior to graduating and synthesizing my hopes and goals with my work, I am thankful for my simple role within this growing program (giving feedback, etc.). Having models like Sarah Ray and Loren Collins actively working to fill their roles while being critical of their own work helps me to set my own mental path.  

 “To the extent that we can help them understand their anguish in the context of broader structures, be self-reflexive about their emotional responses to narratives of urgency, recognize the simultaneous humility and power that comes with being part of a network of obligation, we will turn their impotence into agency” (Ray, 13).