This introductory article argues that contemporary academic teaching contexts are filled with anxiety. Students enter the classroom with a host of uncertainties, while teachers often suffer the burden of personal and professional anxieties of their own. Although many of these are historically specific, rooted in particular political, economic, and ecological circumstances, the authors argue that they may be productively approached through the strategies outlined in this introduction and the articles of this cluster of articles. They advocate tackling the question of anxiety consciously, responsibly, and tactfully, guided both by teachers’ experiences and by their knowledge of theoretical approaches to course content. Drawing principally from affect theory, but also enfolding concepts from intersectional feminism, digital humanities, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies, the authors share tactics for working with anxiety rather than striving to eliminate it or ignore it. They argue that, once we see our pedagogy as anxious, we begin to see opportunities to broach it as a subject that can productively engage with the core tenets of academic inquiry.

This article considers the pedagogical implications of climate change and other environmental catastrophes of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch identified by climate scientists. In the Anthropocene, the human species has become the most significant force shaping Earth’s geosphere and is responsible for a number of anxiety-producing effects beyond the rise of global temperatures. As erratic weather patterns and extreme weather events have increased, climatologists have been perfecting new methods of single-event attribution capable of linking particular adverse weather events (including droughts, heat waves, flooding tornadoes, and hurricanes) directly to climate change. To provide a concrete example of those universal trends, the author applies her experiences in teaching in Texas, which is strongly marked by long-term forces of anthropogenic environmental devastation (such as the northward migration of the oak trees and alterations in the lithosphere caused by oil extraction). It has also been impacted by hurricanes, floods, and freezes that delayed the onset of the Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 semesters and, in many cases, damaged or destroyed her students’ homes at Texas A&M. The article recounts the strategies that her learning community used to adjust to these exigencies and then offers suggestions for adapting these strategies to other locales.