Course Overview

COURSE OVERVIEW

This seminar explores the concepts, methods, and projects that have shaped the environmental humanities (EH) as a transdisciplinary field, with a particular focus on the last twenty years. We will compare EH approaches to the environmental sciences and to environmental movements while considering the field’s intellectual commitments to narrative, epistemology, cultural critique, and social and ecological justice, among others. Alongside this work, we will examine current EH collaborations and centers that address extractive capitalism and the climate crisis through variously community-based, site-specific, and public work.

COURSE TEXTS
  • Materials on Canvas
  • Candis Callison, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (2014)
  • Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017)
  • Lauren Redniss, Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West (2021)
  • Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (2008)
  • Julie Sze, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (2020)
ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES IN PRACTICE

These networks, labs, centers, initiatives, and projects will provide models for us. In teams, you will select one of these to get to know in depth and provide fodder for your collaborative blueprint for a multidisciplinary, collaborative, community-based or otherwise public environmental humanities project/center (see assignments on next page for details).