Intersection between the Gull Island Institute and the “Animate Landscapes” Course

How did the Gull Island Institute and its “three pillars” intersect with our experience on Penikese Island?

The descriptions and reflections throughout this website answer this question better than I can, but the students asked me to summarize their reflections. This experience worked because the students were invested in it. The word community shows up more than any other in their reflections. Labor and self-governance both before and on the island transformed them from students into a community.  They weren’t students anymore – this was their trip to Penikese, their experiment, and their experience. I might have raised the money and set the syllabus, but they made it happen.  They were each other’s caretakers, each other’s interlocutors, each other’s community. Without labor and self-governance, they would have remained passive recipients of a curated experience, served up to them like a meal, and they would have sat back and judged. Instead, because they had to open themselves to each other in self-governance, they were able to open themselves to the beauty the island showed them, the vastness of the starry night sky and the brilliance of the ocean. They listened to each other and to the island, and this made them able to speak. I am deeply grateful that they gave themselves so generously to the experience.

Justine Buck Quijada