ABSTRACT
In an age in which the climate emergency requires the global collaboration of divergent fields, this chapter presents the border-free class, ‘Climate Crisis: Teaching fiction and philosophy at the end of the world,’ as an example of a transnational/transatlantic virtual exchange. Co-taught in an online format with students from universities in the US and Germany and from multiple disciplines in education, the humanities and the sciences, this course established a transcultural and transdisciplinary conversation. Inspired by physicist-philosopher Karen Barad’s concept of intra-activity and informed by a monistic understanding of culture that transverses the nature-culture divide, the methodology used in the classroom encouraged what we call intra-cultural learning between participants from different sides of the Atlantic, as well as between humans and the more-than-human world that includes us. Linking posthumanist philosophy and post-disciplinary teaching, the chapter discusses the course as ‘a staging’ in the philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ sense. Establishing a productive moment of hesitation in Stengers’ sense, a pause that allowed us to ask ‘What are we doing?’, students and instructors achieved an affective witnessing by taking the time to acknowledge the traumatic loss caused by planetary ecological degradation and to develop affective relationships with diverse human and more-than-human others, beyond national and ontological divides.
