[ENVS] Losing Control of Campus Landscapes
Building: Curtis Hall City: Medford, MA 02155 Room: Curtis Hall - Multipurpose Room Campus: Medford/Somerville campus Wheelchair Accessible: Yes Open to Public: Yes Event Type: Lecture/Presentation/Seminar Event Sponsor: School of Arts and Sciences Event Sponsor Department / Area: Environmental Studies program RSVP Information: https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EDXfAMyATsOvhnBhYKP6tw Link: https://as.tufts.edu/environmentalstudies/news-events/hoch-cunningham-lecture-series#oct30 This lecture examines the paradoxes of care and control in campus landscapes. I trace the tension between the ordered care of campus master planning and the improvisational care of grassroots agroecological experiment, showing how each constrained the futures that could be imagined. Using metaphors from Anna Karenina to Claude Shannon’s concept of informational entropy, I argue that sustainability emerges not from perfection but from surprise, multiplicity, and relational responsiveness. Case studies from the University of British Columbia and Yale demonstrate that when shared labor, student-centered pedagogy, and ecological complexity are foregrounded over metrics-driven control and efficiency, campuses can serve as laboratories for more just and adaptive futures. To “lose control” is not to embrace chaos but to resist foreclosure—to vivify the ecological and social futures of the university as open, relational, and delightfully, surprisingly weird.