{"id":11559,"date":"2021-01-29T15:35:46","date_gmt":"2021-01-29T20:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=11559"},"modified":"2021-06-14T07:09:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T12:09:37","slug":"eco-humanities-seminar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/01\/29\/eco-humanities-seminar\/","title":{"rendered":"Eco-humanities seminar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I will be making parts of my “Advanced Environmental Humanities” course open to the EcoCultureLab<\/a> community and a limited broader public. Technical details remain to be worked out, but I’d like to make our readings and discussions open, so as to include interested participants from outside the university community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The course is a graduate and upper level undergraduate seminar premised on the understanding that the current “global moment” is deeply challenging, confusing, and dispiriting, but at the same time potentially “pregnant with possibility,” and that the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities has much to offer it. The class will be meeting online using MS Teams software on Thursdays, beginning February 4 and running until May 6, 1:15-4:15 pm Eastern (New York City) time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is a brief description. Anyone interested in joining the class for some of the readings and discussions can write me about it<\/a>. If we’re lucky, we may occasionally get an author or two to join us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Advanced Environmental Humanities<\/span><\/strong> (ENVS295 \/ NR395) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This seminar course will explore current themes and issues in the interdisciplinary environmental humanities through readings and discussions of theoretical and empirical texts across fields including environmental philosophy, literary and cultural studies, social and media theory, and others. Themes to be explored may include: Anthropocene studies, technoscience studies, posthumanist and decolonial theory, affect theory, animal and multispecies studies, and others. Students will be expected to carry out a research or applied practice project building on themes at the confluence of critical theory, environmental advocacy, and creative arts\/humanities practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thematic Overview<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is broadly recognized today that ecological problems present deep challenges to human society, and that technical solutions and policy responses are insufficient for addressing them. Understanding and engaging these challenges effectively requires historical understanding of their multiple and interacting causes, and humanistic and cultural approaches to motivating responses on multiple social scales. The emergence of the Environmental Humanities (henceforth, \u201cEH\u201d) as an interdisciplinary field testifies both to how this recognition has grown across multiple disciplines and to how critical theory and practice toward an ecologically sustainable culture has only just begun. The latter task faces obstacles at the levels of policy and politics, communication, psychology, and culture. The arts and humanities are central to addressing and overcoming these obstacles. The course will explore this problematic with a focus on key current readings in the environmental humanities and on current topics in the broader culture, including climate change action, social and racial justice, media disinformation, and others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This semester\u2019s course will begin from a recognition that we are living through an acute sociopolitical crisis, in which cultural, economic, technological, and ecological factors combine to produce deep differences in the perception of political identity and affiliation, of race and culture, and of environmental issues. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic (and Covid \u2018denialism\u2019), this past year\u2019s Black Lives Matter protests (and counter-protests), and the recent U.S. elections and the attack on their legitimacy all reflect forms of deep contention that mirror debates over climate change and climate justice (including \u2018climate denialism\u2019). Together they have brought about a situation in which it is difficult to know how and where to get one\u2019s bearings: with such deep social fractures, where do we start in building the kinds of coalitions of thought and practice that will be necessary to build a socially just and ecologically sustainable world? Is it even reasonable to hope that the latter can be achieved? How do we best orient ourselves theoretically and practically in this murky and shifting terrain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With these questions in mind, the format and expectations of this course will be somewhat flexible and individualized. We will organize the course around three overarching themes, which have been among the most prominent themes<\/a> in the environmental humanities in recent years: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Attempts to grasp the world-encompassing totality of the climate and extinction crises: <\/strong>Recent scholarship has featured debates over the naming of the \u201cAnthropocene<\/a>,\u201d the place of capitalism<\/a> and neoliberalism within it, and articulations of the \u201cdeep time<\/a>\u201d of human<\/a> relations with the geological<\/a>, earthly, and chthonic<\/a> beyond<\/em> that preceded us and will outlast us. Here we find efforts to scope out what it means to live at, or even after<\/a>, the \u201cend of the world,\u201d in a time of epistemic<\/a> violence, great derangement<\/a>, species loss<\/a>, deaths of civilization<\/a> and even of the \u201cposthuman<\/a>,\u201d and all the loss, grief, mourning<\/a>, rage, and other emotions<\/a> conjured up at the intersections of geology, history, and the colonial<\/a> and capitalist petrocultures<\/a>, militarisms<\/a>, and technofutures<\/a> that collectively mark our world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Debates over the ontological multiplicity of \u2018the human,\u2019 and the need to decolonize our understandings of it<\/strong>: Sparked by the previous decade\u2019s calls<\/a> for an \u201contological turn<\/a>,\u201d and connected to the decolonial<\/a>  thread in all its forms\u2014Indigenous<\/a>, anti-racist, Black, women of color, global South<\/a>, transnational<\/a>, et al.\u2014 many scholars argue that the world is riven not only by cultural differences, but by ontological differences, differences of \u201cworld\u201d<\/a> and of \u201cworld-making<\/a>.\u201d These differences require \u201ccosmopolitical<\/a>\u201d methods of renegotiating the conditions for coexistence within multiple entanglements<\/a> with ecology, biology, and cosmology in their political, affective, and imaginal<\/a> contours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Empirical and ethnographic efforts to map out the <\/strong>multispecies<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>entanglements<\/strong><\/a> of the cultural and natural, material and discursive<\/strong>, as humans contend with their relations with more-than-human worlds<\/strong>: Many of these efforts engage with the \u201cnew materialist<\/a>\u201d turn in its speculative<\/a>, relational<\/a>, object-oriented<\/a>, animist<\/a>, enactive\/affective<\/a>, and other forms, while others intersect with the \u201cposthuman<\/a>\u201d turn in its \u201cmore-than-human<\/a>\u201d and \u201ctranshuman<\/a>\u201d varieties. Others are part of the tradition by which artists<\/a> and philosophers continually rediscover the sheer delight<\/a> of life in its biological, animated (and animist) exuberance. The animal<\/a>, viral<\/a>, fungal, microbial, vegetal<\/a>, bodily<\/a>, crystalline, watery<\/a>, oceanic<\/a>, elemental<\/a>, and darkly<\/a> and brightly<\/a> ecological\u2014all these and more provoke creative engagements that continue to challenge our thinking about what constitutes the world and our many possible placings within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Required or strongly recommended texts: <\/strong>While most of our readings will be provided in electronic form via Blackboard, the following are books that I recommend you purchase, borrow, or access in full in some way, as we will likely read several chapters (if not the entirety) from each of them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n