Reflections Seminars: Fall 2026

First Semester Students

The Last of Us: An Introduction to Eco Pessimism and Eco Horror

Mikaela Bobiy (Humanities) and Kris Woofter (English)
Wednesday 11:30 – 2:30 & Friday 10:30-2:30
CREDITS: Humanities 345-101 and English 603-101

This seminar-style paired English and Humanities course looks at environmental exploitation, climate crisis, and ecological catastrophe through the lens of critical pessimism and horror affects. The philosophers, theorists, and creators discussed in the course approach anxieties around impending ecological disaster through apocalyptic speculation; appeals to cosmic horror sensations such as shock, sublimity, and dread; and considerations of human finitude and extinction—or what Eugene Thacker calls “the world without us.”

From the smallest microscopic organisms to the seemingly infinite reach of the cosmos, “nature” in eco-horror is potentially terrifying. Cosmic horror asks us to consider conceptions of space and time that far exceed human capacities—think of our recent trip around the moon and the dread and excitement it provoked. Yet, elemental forces on our own planet such as wind, rain, fire, cold, and heat, and expansive spaces such as oceans, deserts, forests, and glaciers, are as much a potential source of horror as cosmic horror’s dreadful implications of human and planetary extinction, or speculative eco-horror’s fears of human limitations and overreaching.

Among the types of eco-pessimism we will consider are nonhuman animal invasion horror, pandemic and contagion horror, environmental horror (pollution, toxic waste, climate change), plant horror, folk horror, nuclear horror, cosmic horror, and various combinations of these. We will draw our considerations from forms of eco-pessimistic fiction and creative nonfiction in the form of philosophical aphorisms, short stories, essays, novels, moving image works (TV, cinema), and poetry. As a student-centered seminar, the course will be based on significant contribution from the students in our class discussions, as well as in-class analytical writing, lectures, and creative alternatives to traditional assessments.

The course is structured into different “clusters,” each focused on topics that build towards an understanding of eco-pessimism and eco-horror as ways of knowing and experiencing the world. Throughout the semester, the instructors will conduct the course meetings jointly to encourage connections and linkages between the ideas and themes explored in the Humanities and English course components.

Hey Dingdong, pay attention

Joseph Rosen (Humanities) and Jay Shae (English)
Tuesday 2:30-5:30 & Thurs 2:30-6:30
CREDITS: Humanities 345-101 and English 603-101

Attention is the most valuable resource in the world: the people who keep your eyeballs glued to social media are billionaires. But YOU are the source of that wealth. So how will you spend your precious attention before you die?

This co-taught Reflections seminar sees curiosity and heightened attention as the basis of fresh knowledges: whether it’s learning to feel the cadence of life’s rhythms in a line of poetry or in the footfall of an urban stroll. We’ll move: through the pages of books, in performance-based exercises, and on walks. The grass beneath our feet, the faces in the crowd are ready to come alive, if only we pay attention.

What we know depends upon what we pay attention to. So let’s get back to basics: this course will be a workshop on attention as the basis of knowledge. We’ll do some weird stuff: improvisational, experiential exercises, both inside and outside of the classroom, that explore the multi-sensory and embodied nature of attention. We’ll try meditation and see what we can learn when we pay attention to boring things. Does Wonder lead to Knowledge? Can it lead to new forms of Freedom? Love? Beauty? Democracy? Who knows, but let’s explore how we can know others, the world, and ourselves, by Paying Attention.

In the English portion of this class, we’ll read from a range of genres—from literary essays, to haiku and modernist poetry, to gothic fiction and film. Authors may include Basho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Edgar Allen Poe, Thich Nhat Hanh, Walt Whitman, Mary Shelly, and Virginia Woolf.

In the Humanities portion of this class, we’ll read Blaise Pascal, Simone Weil, Martin Buber, David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Shunryu Suzuki and others—though ultimately your own experience will be the guide to understanding the nature of your attention.

Third Semester Students

Making yourself at home: rituals and stories of hospitality

Gray Miles (Humanities) and Rebecca (English)
Tuesday and Thursday 11:30-2:30
CREDITS: Humanities World Views 345-102 and English Literary Themes 603-103
Pre-requisites: Humanities 101 and English 101, 102

You remove your shoes and stand, full of expectation, in the antechamber, waiting to cross the threshold and step into the circle of the hearth. An escort guides you into a place of comfort and warmth; an inner sanctum, a closer circle within circles. The tea purls from the spout and you warm your hands around the cup, mint and jasmine rising to fill your senses as the conversation begins to flow. You are a guest in another’s home.

The chime rings; your door is gently opened; a dear face peers around the corner and you hear your name softly called, along with a greeting. You have prepared them a meal, and the scents sift along the slow, warm currents of air between you. You pour them wine, offer them a chance to wash off the dust of their journey, smile and take their burdens from them. Your guest has arrived in your home.

Guest and Host. Each of us plays these roles throughout our lives, roles that have endured in every culture down through the generations, stretching back to our earliest ancestors. What is it that shapes these deep rituals, these social roles that seem to reveal a corner of our communal soul? The mystery and power of hospitality has long intrigued poets and scholars, artists, philosophers, and builders, indeed anyone who is curious about our kind. What does this feature of culture and history, and even our very bodies and minds, say about us?

In this course we will read stories of hospitality: how it goes well and, more often, how it goes horribly, disastrously wrong. We will learn about culture and ritual, the practical, spiritual, ethical, and reciprocal obligations that crystallize in the relations of hospitality. Anthropology, sociology, and psychology will provide lenses with which to understand its importance and intricacies. Literature, visual art, performance, and film will invite us to explore the deep well of need and desire, anxieties and expectations that lies beneath this key aspect of all human (and more-than-human) life. We will discuss, perform, and enact hospitality in the classroom and beyond. None of us will take hospitality for granted again, or fail to understand its complexities. We will experience together what it really means both to welcome the stranger and be the stranger welcomed.

Questions? Contact Gabrielle Bernardin, Reflections Administrative Assistant: at gbernardin@dawsoncollege.qc.ca or by MIO.