Facing Human Wrongs
August 15, 2022

As part of the Institute’s commitment to expanding the conversation around the climate and nature emergency, Wall Catalyst Student Fellows will be participating in Facing Human Wrongs an online, interdisciplinary course at UBC that addresses the ethical and practical complexities and paradoxes of mainstream approaches to global challenges.
The course content touches upon systemic, historical and ongoing violence, unsustainability, our complicities in social and ecological harm, and our tendency to address complex problems, such as biodiversity loss, food insecurity, economic and political crises, and the potential for social and environmental collapse, with simplistic solutions. The course requires students to be willing to be uncomfortable and to have their perspective challenged.
This is not a basic course about colonialism, slavery, capitalist exploitation, racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy or environmental destruction – it is a course that uses “depth pedagogy” to help you navigate the nuances, complexities and paradoxes of identifying and interrupting these events and practices. The course does not aim to teach you what to think, but to expand your capacity to respond with more discernment, sobriety, maturity, and accountability: to “dig deeper and relate wider”.
Facilitated and led by Wall Associates Sharon Stein (Educational Studies) and Will Valley (Land and Food Systems).
Course materials are available online for self-study and informal groups (recorded lectures, videos, documentaries, readings and quizzes, analytical and land-based exercises)
You can learn more about the course here.