Centre for Environmental Humanities
One of the UK’s leading centres for research on the environmental humanities
CEH members Ben GJ Thomas and Michael Malay have collaborated on a new podcast about the transatlantic history of eels. Loops is a podcast from Bristol-based Caraboo Projects, exploring visual arts, social histories, folklore and music.
In this episode, Ben explores entanglements of eels in Atlantic histories with guests Michael Malay, Thom van Dooren, John Wyatt Greenlee and Rebecca Thomas. Stream the podcast on the Caraboo Projects website here.
Lena Ferriday introduces her PhD research on landscape and embodied experience in the south west of England. Her research is funded through the AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.
Despite its material and ecological origins, environmental history has been profoundly influenced by the cultural turn, with scholars emphasising the importance of considering the cultural contexts in which natural spaces are embedded. My PhD project seeks to blend the cultural and material approaches with a focus on the human body and its corporeal sensations. Over the next four years, I intend to explore the implications of embodied experience on the cultural demarcations of certain landscapes, and thus demonstrate the value of this material-cultural approach for examining the historical development of human-landscape relationships.
Using the urban and rural landscapes of South-West England as a case study, my project will interrogate the embodied experiences of tourists across the long nineteenth century. Extending from a central research question which asks how visitors corporeally experienced the South West in this period, I will then consider the implications of these experiences on wider national conceptions for how landscapes should and should not be engaged with in this period. Scholarship of outdoor leisure movements has often positioned the expansion of ramblers’ clubs in the 1920s as a milestone for the fostering of a new corporeal relationship with British landscapes, the point at which experience diverged from those of Victorian elite gazing upon landscapes from a distance.
I will begin by analysing guidebooks to the South West, in order to consider the expectations and norms regarding tourists’ physical navigation through these landscapes in this period. These sources will then be combined with accounts of tourists, which will elucidate where these expectations were observed and contravened, allowing for greater comprehension of the extent to which Victorian tourists regarded landscapes to be visceral, multi-sensory spaces of engagement.
Focusing on the environments within which sensory stimuli are produced, this project proposes a new methodological framework for sensory history. Mark Smith has set an influential agenda for sensory history which asserts the importance of considering the consumption of senses, as opposed to their production. By focusing on the physical components of sounds and smells, he argues, much sensory history has attempted to discursively ‘reproduce’ the sensory stimuli of an historical moment, rather than consider their consumption as historically and culturally contingent. Therefore, it is sensory consumption that scholars should examine, in order to situate sensual experience in its historical and cultural context.
By combining sensory and environmental history, this project, however, emphasises the importance of both the production and consumption of sensory stimuli. Sensual experiences are fundamentally entangled with the environmental contexts which produce them. Drawing together the landscapes from which sounds, smells and embodied experiences manifest, and their cultural reception by the tourists that moved through them, will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of landscape engagement in this period. In so doing, I will advocate for the importance of assimilating sensory and environmental histories.
Across the project, I endeavour to engage with practice-based methodologies that are slightly unconventional for scholarship within the humanities. Inspired by the recent autoethnographic phenomenological studies of Tim Ingold and John Wylie exploring the corporeal experiences of rural walking, the resources of the DTP will support a number of trips to conduct walking as a research method. Spending time in the South West tracing the routes taken in the life-writings I am studying, will allow me to engage more deeply with the embodied experiences that these landscapes provide.
I hope that gaining experience with and finding value in such practice-based methodologies will allow for these trips to evolve into a public engagement program in my final year. Here, I intend to produce a series of curated walks across the South West, to engage the local public in the area’s mobile and sensual histories. With the success of writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Simon Armitage, I hope that drawing on the popular appeal of reflective walking will provide a valuable and unique opportunity to engage the wider community in my research.
Courtenay Crawford introduces her new MSc and PhD project, funded by an ESRC 1+3 grant through the South West Doctoral Training Partnership.
Mention Buddhism and you’ll often get a response shaped by its recent commodification into a self-care trend. Mindfulness apps, cheerful Buddha incense holders and the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up have led many to assume that Buddhism, like deep breathing and scented candles is primarily a technique for managing stress. Do I even need to tell you that these assumptions are wide off the mark? Probably not, yet even those who are aware ‘Buddhism’ goes deeper than these stereotypes may be surprised to hear it paired in the same sentence with ‘post-humanism’ ‘decoloniality’ ‘deconstruction’ and even ‘anarchism’.
Yet I’m about to embark on research linking just these streams of thought. This October I’ll be studying for the MSc Society & Space with plans to continue to PhD study through the ESRC 3+1 route in 2021. My research will ask how Buddhism can help us reconceive the politics of the more-than-human world in an age of planetary crisis. Buddhist thought has a unique contribution to make here, yet it’s frequently overlooked as a source of theory for approaching these questions (and other social science questions more generally).
Just like other non-Western philosophies, perceptions of Buddhism have been framed through the colonial encounter. Whilst nineteenth century explorers to Tibet, China, India and Japan, did much to inspire fascination with ‘Oriental religions’, early translations of Buddhist texts often understood Buddhism through a Christian lens, equating the Buddha with Jesus. This, and the general imperial refusal to take other ways of thought and life seriously have ensured that Buddhism is yet to receive much serious academic attention outside of religious studies and history departments.
For this reason alone, Buddhist perspectives can and should be mobilised as a source of decolonising critique. But it’s not just valuable as a perspective from which to criticise. Contemporary Buddhisms brought to the West by Tibetan refugees and modern Japanese scholars such as D.T. Suzuki from the 1950s onwards have demonstrated the breadth, diversity and originality of Buddhist scholarship and practice. And more recently, excellent work has been carried out demonstrating historical Buddhism’s clear pertinence to contemporary philosophical and political concerns more broadly.
In fact many of most disruptive (and productive) concepts shaping contemporary humanities study today were anticipated by Buddhist thought by literally thousands of years. Put it this way – if names like Derrida, Deleuze, Whitehead, Latour, and Stengers are more familiar to social scientists today than Nagarjuna, Dogen, and Candrakirti this is not because the latter have nothing relevant to say on topics such as deconstruction, non-representational theory, subjectivity and self, embodiment, the symbolic order or the production of knowledge (although of course the way they mobilise and describe these concepts is completely different.)
Post-human concepts of relational networks and assemblages, which have so radically re-shaped geographical approaches to understanding human/environment relations, find close resonance in pratitya samutpada, or the doctrine of mutual causality, an ontology of radical relation. Pratitya samutpada sees reality as process – patterns of self-organising physical and psychological events which have no fixed structure or semiotics. This interdependence logically implies an ethic of care and kind-heartedness (towards all sentient beings), a cornerstone of Buddhist practice common to all traditions.
In an age of climate crisis the ethical imperative to try to relieve suffering is being interpreted increasingly to include ecological care for the more-than-human world (including heterogenous and complex ‘sentient beings’ such as watersheds, bio-regions and radioactive waste) and the resulting politics of this ‘Eco-dharma’ have many similarities to activisms inspired by deep ecology, indigenous, ecofeminist and anarchist philosophies. This global wave of ecologically-informed Buddhist practice is the starting point for my research, but I’m hoping to use it as a springboard for bringing Buddhist critique into geography more generally – applying Buddhist ideas to questions of political ecology, inter-species relationships, care-giving, and environmental governance.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to disrupt some assumptions along the way – including the idea that Zen is primarily concerned with minimalist interior design and esoteric catchphrases. For me, it offers something much more radical and ultimately subversive – a philosophical commitment to experiment with risky ideas and relentlessly question the foundations of your knowledge (as well as a strong suggestion to not take yourself too seriously, and to always be prepared for absurdity and impossibility!) I hope that these will be useful qualities for a new postgraduate researcher to bring into their academic practice and I’m sure that both Deleuze and Dogen would agree.
And of course, Buddhist psychology and meditative practice do offer highly effective methods for understanding the mind, cultivating equanimity and un-learning habitual patterns of thought. It’s exactly this refusal to sit neatly in disciplinary boxes that makes Buddhism such a fascinating area of study – a philosophy of the mind and world which is simultaneously theory and practice. Buddhism asks us to move beyond dualisms of self/world, human/non-human and thought/reality which is exactly why its perspectives are essential to understanding our entangled, inter-dependent and precarious life in the age of the Anthropocene. It offers us an injunction to both sit down (learn to change your mind through meditation) and wake up (liberate yourself through taking ethical action), demonstrating beautifully Marx’s dictum that the true purpose of philosophy is not just to interpret the world, but to change it.
Milo Newman, PhD candidate in human geography, introduces his project on creativity and extinction. Milo’s research is funded through the AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.
Looking at your hearts, suspended in their jar, I try and imagine the two of you still alive. I know that if you were anything like your closest living kin, you would have bonded for life. You lived a long time, and it would have been a relationship that had gathered and deepened over years. By the time you came together this final time, the congregations that were so important to your kind were already a thing of the past. Perhaps you were aware of how empty your world had become. Although you were alone on that low rock, it could be that you were accompanied by the memory of the multitude that had once been. By this point it was already too late. There were too few of you to recover what had been lost. Even so, maybe you would have nodded to each other and tried to make the best of it. Maybe you would have started showing off, just as those before you had always done; turning your heads from side to side so the bright white around your eye would have caught the light. Maybe then, with an exuberance tinged with grief, you would have thrown your heads back and let out an ecstatic cry; the vivid yellow inside your mouths shining like a beacon, mimicking the sun.
Catastrophic anthropogenically-driven biodiversity loss is a defining problem of our time, with hundreds of extinctions observed every year, and many more occurring unnoticed. Reacting to the scale of this issue, extinction studies researchers have called for new interdisciplinary responses interrogating what extinction means, why it matters, and how it is narrated.
‘Mourning Auks’ is an innovative practice-led project examining how artful geographic methods and outcomes can contribute to these vital questions. Over the next four years I plan to explore what novel and affective modes of engaging with anthropogenically-driven species loss can be generated through creative articulations of the emotional dimensions of extinction, and how these can be communicated in public artistic and museum contexts.
In extinction studies, extinction is understood not as a singular, generic concept, but as something that exists through multiple specificities relatable to the diversity of lifeworlds being lost. This is generally explored via case studies, which employ critically-driven creative-academic storytelling to express the biological, cultural and temporal particularities of species, their unique phenomenal worlds, and the significance of extinction within multispecies entanglements. This narrative-based approach provides a form of witnessing that is attentive to others in the face of irreparable loss, that counters human exceptionalism, and creates new ethical and cultural modes that help to resist the destructive legacies of anthropogenically-driven extinction more broadly.
Unexplored potential exists for artistic methods to undertake and communicate these extinction-orientated case studies. Through a case study on the now extinct great auk, my practice-led project will explore and analyse ways of engaging broader audiences with this field. It aims to expand the affective reach of these essential attempts to re-articulate contemporary species loss, and its ethical and socio-cultural imperative.
The great auk was a flightless seabird that was once found in the cold coastal waters of the North Atlantic. These birds nested in huge social colonies on isolated islands, which they returned to every year. These remote skerries provided protection from terrestrial predators. However, they became increasingly vulnerable after technological advances in ocean-going vessels brought European sailors into close proximity to these breeding colonies, which they ruthlessly exploited for food on trans-Atlantic voyages.
My research will begin with analysis of the ‘Garefowl books’, a substantial, underexploited resource held in the Cambridge University Library collections. These manuscript diaries, kept by the Victorian ornithologist and egg collector John Wolley, record interviews with witnesses who were amongst the last to see the auks alive, and who took part in the final hunting parties to their breeding places. Close reading of this material will inform studio-based experimentation utilising artistic methods drawn from archival impulses in contemporary art (see the works of John Akomfrah and Tacita Dean, amongst many others). Following on from Brian Massumi’s 2014 book What Animals Teach us About Politics such ‘playful’ creative practices can be seen as animal in origin, and provide a continuum with animal life (see Merle Patchett’s Archiving). In this context, these textual encounters with the auk’s disappearance offer the means of both interrogating the socio-cultural practices that drove their extinction, and of generating sympathetic multispecies re-alignments.
I also plan to draw the narratives surrounding the auks’ disappearance into emotional geographic frames. These examine spatialisations of emotion in relation to landscape, including those relating to death, such as mourning and grief. Study here is mostly restricted to human contexts, and my project aims to develop this to explore the affective geographies of sites of extinction-driven absence.
In recent re-interpretations, avian philopatry has been re-conceptualised as other-than-human ‘storying-of-place’ (see Thom van Dooren’s excellent book Flight Ways). Hypothesising this for great auks gives their breeding sites potency as places, not just because they were invested with history and meaning for the auks, but because these became the traumatic sites of their extinction. In this context, I plan to undertake fieldwork at some of the auks’ historical breeding colonies, and at those of their closest living relatives. Here, imaginative curiosity towards these species’ remote, liminal, and aquatic geographies will inform a creative enlivening of the great auks’ historical lifeworld, providing the basis for further artistic experimentation centred on site-specific place-making exercises. These will attend to how landscapes are matters ‘of [other-than-human] biographies, attachments and exiles’ in which ‘absence, loss and haunting’ abound (Wylie, 2007: 10), and will survey the more-than-representational emotional aspects of extinction.
You can follow Milo on twitter @_milonewman and see more of his work at www.milonewman.com