This fall, students in Dr. Nicole Hurt’s Rhetoric, Sustainability, and Transformation course (COMM 3310) worked throughout the semester on a sustainability intervention project. Students were tasked to rhetorically intervene in a sustainability problem in our local community. Guided by course readings and their own research, students assessed the causes of a chosen sustainability problem and their perpetuation, examined past efforts that attempted to influence the trajectory of the problem, and studied rhetorical techniques for changing human attitudes and behaviors. At the end of the semester, students implemented rhetorical interventions, analyzed the results of their efforts, and presented their findings at the Office of Sustainability’s “Semester in Review” celebration of sustainability efforts on campus and in the Athens community. Interventions ranged from image events designed to raise awareness about the problem of hard-to-recycle items (pictured), to critical rhetoric images that highlighted the length of time a cup from Jittery Joes sits in a landfill, to a survey tool designed to gauge and then influence student food waste behaviors. The project on student food waste behaviors has recently been featured in a Red and Black article, available by clicking here.
