i. Format
We had the benefit of experiencing two seminar presentations before our own (for which I’m very immensely grateful to our classmates), and we wanted to use our experience in these seminars to iteratively improve on the format. In particular, we wanted to minimize an opposition between the presenters and class. To this end, we tried to rework the arrangement of the classroom, and the breakout group discussion format.

In the previous seminar presentations, the arrangement of the room, especially with use of the long desk, seemed to impose an inadvertent opposition between the presenters and the class. I wanted to minimize this opposition, which I felt most strongly in the first seminar on reproductive labour, but also in the second. During these presentations, the desk seemed to form an affective shield, which justified a more confrontational scrutiny from the class. Were the presenters not banded together behind the desk, but had each been marooned on their own island-chair, I think the kind of probing scrutiny that occurred during the first two seminars would have felt more personal, and thus unsanctioned.

I had proposed arranging the chairs in a circular formation, and interspersing ourselves amidst the class, but Cameron (reasonably) objected to this. (The potential strain on everyone’s necks may have been enough to make this impractical.) Luckily, the desk was nowhere to be found when we entered the classroom. Forgoing the desk seemed to slightly dim the implicit opposition between the presenters and the class, which I appreciated. While we may have been somewhat cowardly in attempting to avoid confrontational scrutiny, we did genuinely feel that this opposition could become unproductive.

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Another way we tried to minimize the opposition between the class and presenters was by joining the breakout discussion groups. We felt that the breakout discussion groups in the prior presentations were not entirely effective, through no fault of the previous presenters, but because the class’ engagement with the readings prior to the presentation was generally low. We integrated ourselves into the breakout groups, and I think this was beneficial. We were able to clarify subtleties in the authors’ views that we had to skim over during our main presentation, and I think our classmates’ critical questions became sharper as a result.

In retrospect, one problem with our integration into the breakout groups was that our classmates’ critical questions had already been fully hashed out once we regrouped. After regrouping, we asked them to repeat their questions, but at this point they had lost the critical (and often spur-of-the-moment) energy that makes such questioning exciting. We made them unemotively rehash a conversation we had just moments prior, and the resulting discussion became a bit dull. Even if the questions were interesting to the members of the other breakout group, they knew that the presenter’s answer was prepared in advanced. At one point, I tried to mitigate this repetition by asking Cameron (who was in the other breakout group) to answer a question from my breakout group, but this put him somewhat on the spot.

ii. Responding to Critical Questions
Our classmates presented varied and incisive critiques of the readings. When presenting, I found that I had to either follow or ignore a natural inclination to defend the author whose views I was representing. On one hand, the author can’t defend themselves, as they aren’t present; I’d spent a good deal of time with the readings I presented, and so was suited for the role of ‘author’s advocate.’ Additionally, if students had not done the readings prior to class, it would be my interpretation of the author’s views that they were critiquing, if they based their critique on the claims I presented. In answering, I needed to determine whether my classmate’s interpretation of the author was misguided by my summary.

During our breakout discussion, for example, Kirin suggested that one of Moore’s claims was inaccurate, but this charge was based on an inaccuracy of my own. In the handout, I wrote that for Moore, the emergence of capitalism as a ‘world-ecology’ was founded upon:

> “New scientific and philosophical ways of knowing: Cartesian dualism; a divide between (‘civilized’) Society and (external) Nature; abstract conceptions of space and time; the transformation of Nature into something legible and controllable through the sciences; and a generally thing-oriented, as opposed to relationship-oriented, ontology (86-88).”

Kirin argued that a ‘thing-oriented, as opposed to relationship-oriented, ontology’ was nothing new in 1450. I agreed, but realized that I had made a mistake in summarizing Moore’s view. Moore didn’t claim that all of these ways of knowing were new in 1450, I had just mistakenly prefaced the list with that claim.

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Another difficultly I encountered when responding to my classmates was critiques that certain terms or ideas were underdeveloped in the readings. The readings we presented were relatively short, and although we did look at some secondary writing from our authors, we weren’t experts in their thinking. This made it difficult to respond to this type of critique: were these terms or ideas genuinely underdeveloped in the author’s thought, or are they simply developed elsewhere?

As one example, Willow suggested that Moore’s prescription to move away from a binary between Nature and Humanity is somewhat incomplete, because he doesn’t provide an alternative (positive) account of Nature. I thought Willow’s critique was smart, and I agreed, but it was difficult to answer. My response was unsatisfactory — I could only confirm that he doesn’t give a positive account of Nature in our reading, but that he potentially develops it elsewhere.

iii. Memorable Criticisms
Several critical responses to the readings from my classmates stood out to me. Kirin and Lucas both thought that Moore’s insistence on a present-day ‘end of Cheap Nature’ was empirically false, as the American oil and gas industry has boomed, and many more natural fuel deposits have been found worldwide, since his article’s publication. I tried to complicate this claim slightly by emphasizing the unavoidable depletion of Cheap Nature on a finite planet, if capitalism’s need for raw material continues accelerating. They agreed with this point, but reemphasized that the timeline for such a depletion is too far in the future to be relevant. They maintained that more immediate concerns about the here-and-now harms of capitalist resource extraction should take priority.

Another critique several classmates put forward was that Moore overemphasized the role ‘ways of knowing’ had on the rise of the ‘capitalocene.’ This was a concern that came up in our own internal discussion of Moore’s article before the presentation. We all agreed that (speaking metaphorically) it was unlikely that European colonists were reading Descartes on their way to the Americas. This emphasis on the role that ideas have seems to be a possible division between Marx and Moore, as Marx seems to primarily emphasize the role that material conditions have in shaping ideas. However, Cameron suggested that Moore’s view is more subtle than we were making it out to be: Moore thinks material conditions and ideas condition each other.