Bringing the Environmental Humanities out into the World (original) (raw)

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Ten steps to strengthen the environmental humanities

INTEGRATION AND IMPLEMENTATION INSIGHTS BLOG, 2018

How might the environmental humanities complement insights offered by the environmental sciences, while also remaining faithful to their goal of addressing complexity in analysis and searching for solutions that are context-dependent and pluralistic? In this blog we list ten ways to make the voice of the environmental humanities stronger, based on a report of a survey we distributed to environmental humanists working worldwide about how their field can add crucial tools to problem-oriented environmental research. https://i2insights.org/2018/09/11/strengthening-environmental-humanities/

Applying the Environmental Humanities: Ten steps for action and implementation.

Swiss Academic Society for Environmental Research and Ecology (saguf), Zurich, Switzerland Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS), Bern, Switzerland., 2017

There is a growing perception in society and among decision makers that addressing environmental problems requires fundamentally new approaches. This report is based upon a survey of practitioners who work in the field of Environmental Humanities. Environmental humanists – by bringing together scholars from the humanities, social sciences and arts, natural sciences, affected people, and activists – can play an important role in broadening the range of voices and ideas in environmental deliberations. They might achieve this by presenting their ideas, and listening to and observing those who have little voice, be these disadvantaged communities, developing countries or indigenous people. International science and science-policy bodies are becoming more open to proposals for supporting environmental humanities. Proponents of the environmental humanities have stressed the necessity of international networking, promoting interdisciplinarity, establishing multi-component research projects, and strengthening the voice of humanities in society and policy circles. But how can the humanities of and for the environment be strengthened? And how can it produce actual solutions on the ground? Can methodologies and concepts utilized by large natural science projects (e.g., inter- and transdisciplinarity, grand challenges, international institutions such as IPCC or Future Earth) be developed in, and in some cases transferred to the environmental humanities? What may be alternative methodologies and strategies for successfully applying insights of humanists who focus on the environment? The goal of this report is to highlight effective strategies for applying the insights from environmental humanities to environmental problem-solving. In so doing, we offer a sampling of current practitioners’ views of research, teaching, and outreach in their field.

Humanities for the Environment—A Manifesto for Research and Action

Human preferences, practices and actions are the main drivers of global environmental change in the 21st century. It is crucial, therefore, to promote pro-environmental behavior. In order to accomplish this, we need to move beyond rational choice and behavioral decision theories, which do not capture the full range of commitments, assumptions, imaginaries, and belief systems that drive those preferences and actions. Humanities disciplines, such as philosophy, history, religious studies, gender studies, language and literary studies, psychology, and pedagogics do offer deep insights into human motivations, values, and choices. We believe that the expertise of such fields for transforming human preferences, practices and actions is ignored at society’s peril. We propose an agenda that focuses global humanities research on stepping up to the challenges of planetary environmental change. We have established Environmental Humanities Observatories through which to observe, explore and enact the crucial ways humanistic disciplines may help us understand and engage with global ecological problems by providing insight into human action, perceptions, and motivation. We present this Manifesto as an invitation for others to join the “Humanities for the Environment” open global consortium of humanities observatories as we continue to develop a shared research agenda.

Applying the Environmental Humanities: Ten steps for action and implementation. Summary.

Swiss Academic Society for Environmental Research and Ecology (saguf), Zurich, Switzerland Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS), Bern, Switzerland, 2017

There is a growing perception in society and among decision makers that addressing environmental problems requires fundamentally new approaches. This report is based upon a survey of practitioners who work in the field of Environmental Humanities. Environmental humanists – by bringing together scholars from the humanities, social sciences and arts, natural sciences, affected people, and activists – can play an important role in broadening the range of voices and ideas in environmental deliberations. They might achieve this by presenting their ideas, and listening to and observing those who have little voice, be these disadvantaged communities, developing countries or indigenous people. International science and science-policy bodies are becoming more open to proposals for supporting environmental humanities. Proponents of the environmental humanities have stressed the necessity of international networking, promoting interdisciplinarity, establishing multi-component research projects, and strengthening the voice of humanities in society and policy circles. But how can the humanities of and for the environment be strengthened? And how can it produce actual solutions on the ground? Can methodologies and concepts utilized by large natural science projects (e.g., inter- and transdisciplinarity, grand challenges, international institutions such as IPCC or Future Earth) be developed in, and in some cases transferred to the environmental humanities? What may be alternative methodologies and strategies for successfully applying insights of humanists who focus on the environment? The goal of this report is to highlight effective strategies for applying the insights from environmental humanities to environmental problem-solving. In so doing, we offer a sampling of current practitioners’ views of research, teaching, and outreach in their field.

Employing the Environmental Humanities: Finding Our Place on a Changing Planet

How do the ideas and applications of the environmental humanities, which make manifest a human capacity to be deeply imaginative, creative, and feeling, contribute to critical conversations about climate change at both the local and global levels? How can we reimagine and transform our current cultural values and economic systems to promote a more sustainable and harmonious coexistence with the more-than-human world? This interdisciplinary course offers an accessible introduction to the environmental humanities by presenting concepts, issues, current research, concrete examples, and case studies. Students will critically examine how human societies have shaped and been shaped by the nonhuman world throughout history, as well as the cultural, ethical, economic, and spiritual dimensions of environmental issues. Through engaging with diverse texts, discussions, and creative projects (experiential learning), students will develop a holistic understanding of the interconnectedness of environmental, social, and cultural values. Lectures and discussions will be supplemented with visual materials, music, and movies where appropriate.

Humanities for the Environment 2018 Report—Ways to Here, Ways Forward

We introduce the Humanities for the Environment (HfE) 2018 Report. The HfE 2018 Report consists of two publications; of which this Special Issue is one. The other is a special section of the journal Global and Planetary Change 156 (2017); 112–175. While the Humanities special issue may primarily reach our colleagues in the humanities disciplines; the Global and Planetary Change section reaches out to that journal's primary readership of earth scientists. The HfE 2018 Report provides examples of how humanities research reveals and influences human capacity to perceive and cope with environmental change. We hope that the HFE 2018 Report will help change perceptions of what it is we do as humanities scholars. Human preferences, practices and actions are the main drivers of planetary change in the 21st century. The academic disciplines of the humanities are largely concerned with how humans perceive, articulate and behave as a species. Therefore, the Humanities for the Environment is a global initiative of eight regional Observatories that aim to bring out how the humanities may contribute to pro-environmental behaviour. This Special Issue reviews ways in which the humanistic disciplines may help us understand and engage with global environmental problems. The " for " is a carefully chosen word. It originated at talks between founders of the HfE initiative in 2009 (primarily Sally Kitch, Sarah Buie, and Poul Holm). We were united in a concern that the humanities were not playing what we thought could be a vital part in global change scholarship and indeed politics. We believed that there was a need to bring out the best of humanities to identify tools and insights that might contribute to the greater good. We wanted to look not just to self-identified environmental humanists, but to the full range of humanities disciplines to find helpful ways forward.

Four problems, four directions for the environmental humanities

Taking into account intersecting trends in political, academic, and popular engagements with environmental issues, this paper concerns the development of environmental humanities as an academic field of inquiry, specifically in this new era many are calling the Anthropocene. After a brief outline of the environmental humanities as a field, we delimit four problems that currently frame our relation to the environment, namely: alienation and intangibility; the post-political situation; negative framing of environmental change; and compartmentalization of “the environment” from other spheres of concern. Addressing these problems, we argue, is not possible without environmental humanities. Given that this field is not entirely new, our second objective is to propose specific shifts in the environmental humanities that could address the aforementioned problems. These include attention to environmental imaginaries; rethinking the “green” field; enhanced transdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity; and increasing “citizen humanities” efforts.