Beautiful Trouble (ed. Boyd & Mitchell)

I've been looking for different structures for my upper-level course in environmental communications, and the Beautiful Trouble organization had been on my mind even before I stumbled across the pocket edition of their book at the irreplaceable Camas Books.

One struggle in this course has been managing the different lenses everyone brings, from their different perspectives and disciplinary homes: environmental studies, economics, sociology, professional communications, and so on. This coming year, I've decided that I'll just go insurgent as my default. If I need to course-correct along the way, so be it.

But should I assign this wee, inexpensive book to them, or should I just use it as a resource?

The book's sections are entitled Tactics, Principles, and Theories, and each section contains 10 to 15 short pieces from different authors. Some of the entries feel a bit dated (some of them very 90s, others very 60s, others from the late 00s and Occupy), and those would be tougher sells, but others are exactly what I'd want.

Beautiful Trouble offers a really accessible way to illustrate the radical use of comms work, and the use of radicals' tools in comms work more generally. I suspect that it would be a great way to push students toward consideration of ideas like decision dilemmas (no, not like that! More like no-win situations), message discipline, and points of intervention.

In my scheming, I've been imagining the course to have three simultaneous streams, one for each of our three weekly meetings, something like:

• Trad Tuesdays: conventional pro.comm,
• Digital Wednesdays: social media, mostly, and
• Guerrilla Fridays (Offline Fridays? Foment Fridays?).

The theoretical elements of this book would suit all three days, but the other material would work best for the guerrilla thread. I've been wanting to include this element all along, but after the experience of some former students, not just in previous version of this course but in other environmental humanities courses I've taught, I'm convinced now that it's essential to do that.

Lots more to think about, but it looks like I'll be doing some of my thinking in the company of Beautiful Trouble. Let me know if you want to do some thinking with me about all this, either in comments or through reaching out via some other means.

Fight on, friends.