Registration Status
Current offerings
Walking with Octavia
Cost: $80
- Thurs., Oct. 2-23, 9-11:30 a.m.
Dates
Location: In person: Arcata
With Renee Byrd, Associate Professor
Explore author Octavia Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower. In this stunning example of Black feminist science fiction and Afrofuturism, main character Lauren Oya Olamina is the daughter of a Baptist minister who grows up in a small walled-in community in Southern California.
They are living in a dystopian future and she does not trust “her father’s god,” so Olamina builds her own religion, Earthseed, finding brief moments to write short, poetic passages on whatever paper she can find.
She makes space for this spiritual and intellectual work in the midst of scarcity, violence, and transformation, from the burning and looting of her walled-in community, to an epic journey where she leads others on a trek to Northern California. The central idea of Earthseed is that "God is Change." How do we move into right relationship with change?
This prescient novel is set between July 2024 and October 2027, and it is feeling less and less like science fiction.
This course includes lectures, discussion of the novel with guiding questions, and a series of ecosomatic walking practices.
Octavia Butler walked everyday. Throughout her notebooks, she tracked the plants she saw on her walks -- whether they were blooming, producing fruit, or losing their leaves. This course will incorporate walking methodologies with this attention to plants as a way of engaging with the ecological themes of the novel.
We will take an approach inspired by Springgay and Truman’s Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, where we will ‘walk-with’ Octavia, the novel, and what her work offers us for meeting the challenges of our times.
A wider ‘community read’ of the novel, sponsored by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, will be happening concurrently with this course, and will offer a slate of optional events and opportunities for engagement.
Class #: 44072
Registration is now open for OLLI members. Non-members may register starting Sept. 3.
Renée Byrd
Dr. Renée M. Byrd is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Cal Poly Humboldt. Dr. Byrd received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from Mills College and her Ph.D in Feminist Studies from the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is an outspoken prison activist scholar, whose research centers the intersection of race, gender, mass imprisonment and neoliberal political rationalities. Dr. Byrd has won numerous awards and fellowships including the Sociologists for Women in Society Chow Green Dissertation Scholarship, as well as the University of Washington’s graduate medal, which is awarded to doctoral students whose academic expertise and social awareness are integrated in a way that demonstrates an exemplary commitment to the University and its larger community. Her current book project is titled, “Punishment’s Twin”: Theorizing Prisoner Reentry for a Politics of Abolition. The project argues that prisoner reentry is deployed using a vocabulary, which mimics a critique of mass imprisonment, in order to expand the punishment system and render it more flexible, cost effective and legitimate.Outside of academia, Renée has worked as a legal advocate for women prisoners with Justice Now in Oakland, a family advocate for youth in the Juvenile Justice System and on broader campaign work aimed at building a world without prisons. In collaboration with the Books Not Bars Project of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Dr. Byrd helped produce the human rights documentary System Failure: Violence Abuse and Neglect in the California Youth Authority, which is currently distributed by WitnessNYC. Central to her work is the goal of using research justice and filmmaking not just as methods, but as tools for building community and social movements. Dr. Byrd is also currently working on an experimental film about transformative justice and methods for addressing violence without relying on policing and prisons. Dr. Byrd works with MA students interested in exploring systems of oppression, state violence, women of color feminisms, post-structuralism, Foucault, biopolitics, and Law and society scholarship.
Renée's other website: Earthseed Laboratories
