Abstract What is a pedagogy of the Anthropocene? Put another way, what would it look like to teach in a way that disrupts the logic of fossil fuel extraction? Building on critiques of Enlightenment thought that identify the causalities between dualistic models such as mind/body or nature/culture and systems of enslavement and extraction, the author argues we must orient ourselves against the toxic logic that has led to our current planetary crisis, and that a class on “climate fiction” can estrange students from the ubiquity of an epistemology that alienates us from the natural world and each other. Stories about climate change, whether speculative or realistic, can pry students loose from more familiar narratives that have immiserated us as a species and a planet. The author encourages a reorientation of how we teach that reframes the classroom as a space for students to imagine each other as allies rather than as competition, displacing the fetishization of “rigor” that aligns us to false idols of meritocracy and scarcity instead of the abundance that is possible when we find happiness in collective as opposed to individual success.

A proliferation of scholarship, teaching, and activism in the field of rhetoric and composition attends to prison writing, as an ethical imperative to combat mass incarceration and its dire consequences (Jacobi, Hinshaw, Berry, Rogers, etc.). However, parole board writing— arguably the genre of writing within prison most closely tied to material liberation—remains largely unexamined, both in legal studies and rhetoric and composition. The authors of this article have been working together for the past three years in a weekly writing workshop for former “lifers”—individuals sentenced to life with the possibility of parole; in this setting, parole board writing comes up often in free writes, discussions, and formal compositions. In fact, some participants have brought the pieces they read to the parole board to workshop for discussion and even continued revision. The article analyzes this prison-writing genre with participants of the workshop who coauthor the piece. We argue that the writing and rhetorical performance required of prisoners when they face parole boards enacts institutional and rhetorical constraints while simultaneously carving out new spaces for freedom and resistance. We examine how the parole board has shifted to a standard based on evaluating an inmate’s “insight” into their crimes (as opposed to being evaluated solely on their originary crimes), and we show the ways that this shift engenders new tensions between 1) writings that affirm existing power dynamics and narratives of responsibility, accountability, repentance, and transformation and 2) writings that subvert and resist dominant discourses and challenge existing power dynamics. Thus, this carceral writing process is at once coercive and subversive, oppressive and empowering, restraining and liberating for those who participate in it.