Centre for Environmental Humanities
One of the UK’s leading centres for research on the environmental humanities
Our friends up the Avon at Bath Spa University have an exciting programme of public lectures lined up at the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities.
The programme runs online from October to January, featuring the CEH’s Dan Haines, among others. Check out the full programme below and follow BSU Environmental Humanities on twitter.
Reblogged from the Environmental History Workshop
We were unable to organise a full Environmental History Workshop this year, but didn’t want to let the year go without creating the annual space for environmental history in the UK that we established EHW for in the first place.
So we are organising a short and sweet ‘What are you doing?’ workshop, inspired by the successful ‘What’s happening in Black British History?’ workshop series. We invite proposals for ten-minute talks on future, new and ongoing research in environmental history. We would like this to be an opportunity to connect with other environmental historians based in the UK and further afield. Think of this as a chance to say ‘hi!’ to your fellow researchers, to float new project ideas, discuss a problem or conundrum in your work or talk about work in progress.
The workshop will be on Zoom on Wednesday 1 December, from 2pm to 4pm, and will feature up to six ten-minute talks.
LVL is back!
We’re excited to announce our autumn schedule which brings together a diverse range of scholars and students from the environmental and geo-humanities. For this term we are keeping the series online, so all are welcome, internal and beyond. Please feel free to circulate this information and flyer to anyone you think might be interested.
For our first instalment of the series, Dr Noreen Masud from Durham University (though joining Bristol University from January 2022) will be presenting Slippage and Fakery in Willa Cather’s Prairie Landscapes. This session will take place on Wednesday 13th October, at the usual time of 4:30-6pm UK time, on Zoom. Please join us for what will be a fascinating paper and discussion, and to welcome a new CEH member!
Later this term we have invited Dr Susanne Ferwerda (Utrecht University) to speak on The Waves, the Ocean: Boats, Borders and Refugee Bodies in Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, and Dr Anushka Peres (University of Revada, Reno) for a paper on Queer Ecovisual Rhetorics and Settler Colonial Landscapes. Details of the full semester’s events can be found on the Events page.
This year’s LVL series is very generously funded by the Centre for Environmental Humanities, the School of Geography, and the English Head of Subject Fund. We are very grateful for this support and excited to present such a diverse series, bringing together scholars exploring landscapes across a range of spatial and temporal contexts, with an emphasis on queer and decolonial spaces.
Free tickets for all the upcoming seminars can be booked via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/literary-and-visual-landscapes-autumn-2021-tickets-173046255007. A Zoom meeting link will be circulated to ticket-holders in advance of each session.
We hope to see you there!
— Lena, Austin and Eline (the new LVL team).
Header image: André Derain, Paysage du Midi (1906), SF MoMA
Dr Pippa Marland (Bristol, Dept of English) has published a new paper in Green Letters, on rewilding and the ‘new georgic’ in recent nature writing by George Monbiot, Isabella Tree, and James Rebanks. The abstract of the article is copied below.
This essay explores the representation of the concepts of rewilding, wilding and regenerative farming in contemporary nature writing, focusing on George Monbiot’s Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (2013), Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018), and James Rebanks’ English Pastoral (2020). It contextualises farming in the broad social, economic and biopolitical arena of the 20th century, and in literary terms reflects on the rupture in the georgic tradition post-World War 2, in order to understand the current tension between conservation and agriculture. The essay also investigates the deployment of the literary tropes of the wild, the pastoral and the georgic in these texts, and concludes by proposing the emergence of a ‘new georgic’ in which the farmer does not simply wrestle with nature in order to produce food but is engaged in producing nature itself.
Pippa Marland, ‘Rewilding, Wilding, and the New Georgic in Contemporary Nature Writing’, Green Letters (2021)
Creative Environments: a workshop on collaborative methods for researchers and artists
Friday 17 September 2021
Call for Contributions
The Brigstow Institute and the Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol invite contributions for a workshop on the role of creativity in conducting and communicating environmental research. During this one-day event, participants will consider how creative research methods and collaborations between researchers and artists can enrich our understanding of contemporary ecological challenges.
Amid growing scholarly interest in art-science collaborations and in transdisciplinary and co-produced research, what can be learned from existing best practice, and what innovations are needed in order to further cultivate ‘arts of attentiveness’ (van Dooren et al., 2016) to our environments? In seeking to answer these questions, the day’s activities will include presentations from academics, a showcase of work by local and international artists, and plenty of time for brainstorming and generating new ideas.
The workshop forms part of the AHRC-funded research project Reimagining the Pacific (PI Dr Paul Merchant). The event will be held in person at the University of Bristol, subject to covid restrictions, but may switch to an online format if necessary. Virtual participation will be facilitated. The workshop may lead to a co-authored publication or other output (format to be discussed at the event).
Contributions are invited in a variety of formats (the following list is not intended to be exclusive):
Submissions from early-career researchers are particularly welcome. Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief biography to paul.merchant@bristol.ac.uk by 15 July 2021.
Reposted from Reimagining the Pacific.
Banner image: “Local surfers from above #chicama #surf #peru” by neverything; licensed under CC BY 2.0
Historians at Bristol have posted news of an interesting public environmental history project undertaken by student Kate Sudakova.
The Great Environmental Destruction Projects of Communism explores the environmental consequences of the great industrialization of the USSR in the twentieth century, focussing in particular on the Volga River and the Caspian sturgeon.
Read the full post and find the project website here.
Circulated on behalf of Dr Aidan Tynan of Cardiff University.
Deadline for submissions of abstracts: September 30, 2021
Celina Osuna, Arizona State University, celina.osuna@asu.edu
Aidan Tynan, Cardiff University, tynana@cardiff.ac.uk
Desert landscapes and ecologies have become central to our perceptions of space and place and to the stories we tell ourselves about the environment. In Western traditions, we frequently see deserts represented as dead or valueless, or merely as exotic backdrops. Such depictions often encode racism and histories of colonial violence. Our conceptions of the desert as wasteland or hostile wilderness can be traced back to Biblical notions of damnation, messianism and salvation, but they also feature extensively in the secular dystopian and apocalyptic vision of the future so widespread today. This volume seeks contributions that interrogate and challenge these stories of the desert while exploring alternative traditions in order to shed light on the multitudinous possibilities of what desert places are and can be.
Storied Deserts: Re-Imagining Arid Environments takes a global point of view on a topic that is too often limited by a regional or national frame. We are interested in the diversity of desert places, which we hope will reflect the diversity of backgrounds and experiences of potential contributors. While recognizing the crucial differences that distinguish arid places from each other, we want to insist that there is something special about them that mark them out from other kinds of places. While the Namib Desert of southwest Africa differs radically from, say, the interior of the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern United States, these places elicit experiences, perceptions, and narratives that can speak to and inform one another. In this sense, deserts embody a singularity and a multiplicity at once.
This simultaneity is complex and rich in intersections and needs to be approached through multidisciplinary perspectives. The volume will draw on work in desert humanities as a field concerned with the flourishings of thought and practice in the arid environments of the world, with multi-ethnic human, nonhuman and more-than-human interrelationships of desert places and the urgent care necessary for them in a time of climate crises. We call on contributors to imagine desert humanities as an emerging field, to explore the range of approaches that deserts demand, and to set directions for future work. We invite non-traditional, creative nonfiction, and experimental pieces as well as more traditional scholarly work. Contributions considering the following topics are welcome, but the volume’s scope is not necessarily limited to only these:
Please send the following to tynana@cardiff.ac.uk or celina.osuna@asu.edu by September 30, 2021:
1) 300-500 word chapter abstract/proposal
2) a brief bio
3) a statement of your interest in this project or contextual background/relevant info
If you are interested in writing a piece and would like to discuss it with the editors before submission of the abstract, please contact us via the email address above. Those with accepted proposals will be expected to submit a full draft (6,000-8,000 words).
Reposted from wur.nl
Are you interested in understanding how different actors know, value and strive to shape river systems in diverging ways? Do you want to learn specifically about approaches for enlivening rivers that are promoted by grassroots water justice movements? Then this could be the perfect PhD opportunity for you!
To further explore how new water justice movements (NWJMs) struggle for enlivening rivers, the Water Resources Management (WRM) group invites applications for four 4-year long PhD projects. We seek highly motivated candidates who want to engage with rivers, environmental justice and social movements in a transdisciplinary, cross-cultural and collaborative way. As candidate, you will study the drivers and inspirations for these emergent approaches and movements, and find out how they translate and promote their ideas transnationally.
Notwithstanding rivers’ fundamental importance for social and natural well-being, riverine systems are dammed and polluted, under great stress worldwide. Expert ontologies and epistemologies have become cornerstones of powerful hydraulic-bureaucratic administrations. Recently, worldwide, a large variety of NWJMs have proliferated that view rivers as a living entity that intertwines nature and humans ecologically, culturally and socioeconomically.
RIVERHOOD is a 5-years project funded by the European Research Council (ERC). It will study, conceptualize and support evolving NWJMs in Ecuador, Colombia, Spain and the Netherlands, developing a new analytical and methodological framework. The central research question is: How do the new water justice movements shape and dynamize riverhood enlivening strategies, institutions and practices, and how can they potentiate radically new scientific and policy approaches for sustainable and equitable water governance?
(Re)Imagined Landscapes Symposium, 9th–10th June 2021
Sign up via Eventbrite here [link].
Wednesday 9th June
All timings are UK time/UTC+1.
10.30–10.45: Welcome (Lena & Eline)
10.45–12.00: Keynote
12.00–13.00: Lunch break
13.00–14.30: Inhabiting (chair: Alice Would)
14.30–15.00: Break
15.00–16.30: Making (chair: Austin Read)
Thursday 10th June
All timings are UK time/UTC+1.
10:30–12.00: Documentary viewing
12.00–13.00: Lunch break
13.00–14.30: Representing (chair: Lizzie Gourd)
14.30–15.00: Break
15.00–16.30: Visualising (chair: Milo Newman)
Sign up via Eventbrite here [link].
Abstracts:
By the late nineteenth century, mid-Cornwall’s long history as a centre of metalliferous mining was ending. For centuries, Cornwall’s mines had been the pulsing heart of an economy and an identity built on extraction: mineral and biological. By the twentieth century, this historic centre of industrial innovations was experiencing a second dramatic environmental transformation, as the burnt and browned land of the central Duchy, dotted with smokestacks and spoil heaps, was quickly covered by brambles, rhododendra and gorse. This re -greening was, however, treacherous. As Cornwall’s land was transformed into an imagined place of pleasant rambles and holiday walks, a new danger arose: the forgotten mineshaft. Hundreds of poorly covered shafts dotted the countryside posing a significant threat to both humans and animals trying to traverse the Duchy’s pitted surface. This paper explores stories of encounters with these forgotten shafts, and the dangers they presented. It points to the ways in which, long after the landowners and mineral lords had departed with their profits, the Cornish people continued to pay the price of an extractive history with the threat of injury and death.
The paper will examine artworks that emerged through a practice-based PhD exploring the entangled complexities of place through the case study of the Taw Estuary in North Devon. The artwork was created through a series of embodied processes fostering slow walking as a disruptive methodology. Central to the project are notions of the entangled nature of our bodies in this and every place, our increasingly troubled human relationships with our landscapes, and forming other ways of knowing, being and recording place that prioritises the haptic over sight. The project has taken up Tim Ingold’s invitation to ‘follow the materials’ (2010), in response to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘matter-flow’. So that these material encounters with the vibrant matter of the Taw, (Bennett, 2010), have formed collaborative and non-hierarchical modes of being and working with the estuary. I position the artwork in relation to Springgay and Truman’s Counter Cartographies (2018), offering alternative haptic maps of this place that record the traces of human debris encountered in the everyday, at a point of rising seas and looming climactic tipping points. Working collaboratively with the estuary’s vibrant matter, the artwork offers other ways of being, knowing and recording, through slow, embodied processes, as methods of attunement.
This presentation describes our work as an art collective in the landscapes of Arctic Norway, and Avonmouth over the past five years. In this talk we will consider the ‘emotional landscapes’ that we inhabited and performed within during our ongoing, longitudinal project. Here we follow Doreen Massey’s description of landscape as dynamic spaces that “…cut through the myriad stories in which we are all living at any moment. Space and time become intimately connected.” Massey, D. (2005) As a collective we were initially commissioned by the Nordland Akademi of Art and Science to ‘think’ and reflect on the shifting landscapes of the Arctic north. As artists we decided to think through making. In our work we worked with local refugees’ groups, fishing historians, young people as a means of researching and articulating points in the landscapes we inhabited. We will discuss our collectives’ successes and limitations in our approach to co-production in Norway and Bristol. We will then provide an account of the physical and emotional landscapes we worked within in the Arctic, how these landscapes were integrated into the series of work in Melbu, Norway and conclude with the ‘tidal’ distribution of the project across the Gulf Stream from Norway to Bristol. In order to highlight the role of collective ritual processes as integral to a forming a shared landscape we will discuss the role of the social and creative rituals of making we conducted and took part in. Our presentation concludes with a brief discussion of our approach as a collective and how this could be used to inform other arts-led research project about and within Landscapes.
The agricultural landscape is going to change over the coming decades as we adopt farming practices that safeguard our biodiversity and are resilient to a changing climate. These changes will impact all of us. Children will grow up in new landscapes, consumers will make purchases based on environmental impact, and farmers will increasingly become custodians of nature. As a research institute, UKCEH frequently predicts land use change into the future, presenting findings as 2D maps for a technical audience. However we recognise that engagement in our research must extend beyond these traditional groups, out to farmers, children and land managers. We have developed two VR systems that procedurally generated real-world landscapes using datasets derived from satellites. We then visualise predicted land use change in these environments to inspire discussion and debate about future farming practises. We will introduce our Minecraft VR experience that creates environments in the popular children’s computer game. This has been used at public events to engage with young children and their families. Second we will introduce E-Viewer, an analogous system built in the Unity gaming engine which provides greater realism and finer scale control over visual representations, well suited for engaging with adult audiences.
The presentation stems from the project Rae rajad (Rae trails), a set of hiking trails in the vicinity of Estonian capital, Tallinn, created onto the platform of smartphone app NaviCup by a team of Estonian literary scholars and folklorists last year. The area that currently is a major suburban logistics and industry hub, has a thick layer of cultural history that is practically not visible in the actual landscape any more. With no intervention into the physical landscape, virtual itineraries actualising the cultural meaning of the area were created. When the map is opened in one’s smartphone, little cultural history stories are activated and presented to the app user as s/he walks along the trails. In the presentation, we will discuss the effect of creating such „virtual palimpsest“ in landscape mainly from a geocritical perspective. By bringing some local lore virtually back to the places where it has been created, actualises historical layers of landscape, provides different points of view (including those of other species), facilitates engagement of different senses, and – last, but not least, explicates intertextual connections between folklore, literature, and natural history. It helps to activate the perception of the landscape in different seasons, during different eras, from the point of view of different species, etc. On the other hand, presenting written texts by means of advanced technological solutions inevitably creates a specifically human layer of meanings onto otherwise dynamic and multi-species’ natural environments. By putting our practical work into theoretical perspective helps to assess the meaning and impact of virtual landscapes on the physical ones.
This paper will discuss the critical origins and implications of the author’s developing art project “Landform”, which processes aerial views of terrestrial landscapes using a software algorithm that transforms the visual scenes into lexical poetry—harnessing a vocabulary derived from geographical dictionaries and the prose of writers such as Jacquetta Hawkes. The system operates by parsing the digital source imagery as a form of computer code, providing instructions for the generative composition of the final poem. The critical goal of this esoteric process—treating landscapes as executable structures, yielding speculative textual outputs rather than exacting numerical measurements—is to model the ‘alternative’ environmental computational practices theorised by scholars such as Jennifer Gabrys. The aim here is to unsettle the privileged data-driven episteme that characterises a deteriorating global environment through the pretensions of totality, quantification, and abstraction. Gabrys contends that such depictions reduce the potentials for how we might perceive and respond to the changes taking place, in failing to attend to their incommensurate, uncertain, and affective dimensions. In “Landform”, the goal is to enact a generative vision of how digital sense-making might also express a world not of latent facts and measurements, which suggest fixed modes of response, but of new possibilities for techno-ecological praxis that centre the speculative, the exploratory, and the creative as critical vectors of investigation, experimentation, and adaptation.
In the bioregion of Wombat Forest on Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Victoria, Australia), Meg Ulman and Patrick Jones from the collective ‘Artist as Family’, in walking for food and fuel through the commons, in turning towards multispecies and elemental communities over the changing seasons and conditions of the weather-world, were becoming-with the biome’s worlding. Wombat Forest: a complex ecology of natives and non-natives, where the dichotomy good/bad is not helpful at all and where non-native species of gorse (Ulex), broom (Genisteae) and blackberries (Rubus) thrive in a fire prone forest of gum trees (Eucalyptus) in part at the expenses of the natives. In their attempt to common well on the public land, grouped with the human others in the ‘Goathand coop’ through a community-led restoration of their forest commons, they decided to introduce goats (Capra aegagrus hircus). Goathand coop: a multispecies commoning performance between the animal and the human, mortal critters making oddkin in this blasted landscape.
This paper uses artistic visual representations of Chat Moss from the nineteenth century to understand the mechanisms which signified environmental transformation on a wetland. Chat Moss was a huge tract of peat bog west of Manchester. Many of the peat mosses in Lancashire witnessed attempts at wholesale drainage and ‘reclamation’ at the turn of the nineteenth century. The storied efforts to drain Chat Moss began in 1796. The impact of the era of parliamentary enclosure on English landscape painting is a commonplace in English art history. While comprehensive drainage projects were less ubiquitous than Enclosure Acts, their impacts were intensely transformative, but have received comparatively little attention. Close reading of recorded encounters with Chat Moss will structure the interrogation of these images. These accounts portray the undrained bog as an aberration; in part for its assumed agricultural unproductivity, but also because the bog resists an assumed dichotomy of land and water. This resistance came from the bog’s structural ambiguity; in some cases bearing a person’s weight, and in others not. This paper argues that representing the bog’s post-drainage structural, and thus, conceptual, stability was a key component of its rehabilitation as a newly dry landscape, ripe for agricultural exploitation.
Scholarship on Nigeria oral literature like indigenous music has tended toward cultural life and relationship in the community, yet little attention is directed at the connection of sounds and music on rocks and valleys landscapes. This paper focuses on the musical narratives of Olúmọ rock and the trajectories of its place and space in Nigeria. Historically, Olúmọ rock is a spiritual rock of refuge for the Ẹ̀gbá (a Yorùbá sub-ethnic group) during the 15th and 16th century’s inter-ethnic wars in Yorubaland. The spiritual significance of the rock as a source of refuge during the war has featured prominently in many folk songs. Within the context of ecomusicology theory, and the use of cultural history, ethnography, musical and textual analysis, we argued that these songs became a vehicle for navigating landscapes, geographical and imaginary spaces and places.
“In the end it was rust. That was what defined this place,” (141) remarks Lee English, one of the protagonists of Philipp Meyer’s American Rust: A Novel (2009), set in the fictional town Buell, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in the early 2000s. Though once “the center of steel production” (7), Buell was now a quintessential “Rust Belt” town. Since 1987, in the deceivingly victorious aftermath of the oil shocks of the 1970s, crisis in the form of deindustrialization, unemployment, and general withdrawal of capital only began to take shape in these increasingly deserted working landscapes. In its narration of an arguably silent/silenced crisis, the novel draws our attention not just to a commonly forgotten region haunted by spectres of the industrial past, but also to how it is within these supposedly dying spaces, with “[e]ntire lives visible in the landscape” (Lee, 143) that people nevertheless continue to survive and generate meaning. As such, what on the surface seems to be a tragic portrayal, this paper argues, actually emerges as a story of hope and perseverance found in unexpected places. It is especially through, elaborate descriptions of ecologically flourishing, deindustrialized landscapes and an existential philosophy of cosmic recycling that American Rust illustrates a continuous reinvention of agency in times of despair.
The Pastoral has been explored in literary and art theory but has not been explored as rigorously in new media studies or visual effects moving-image making. This paper will present the video series ‘Landscape/Composite’ and addresses the theme of imaginary landscapes and changing uses of landscapes. Landscape/Composite is a series of video works that uses visual effects compositing techniques to examine intertextual representations of British idylls and the Pastoral. In terms of process, ‘Landscape/Composite’ applies visual effects techniques to remediate and animate landscape paintings to create ultra high-definition tableaux vivant video works presented on large-scale video screens. It uses Terry Gifford’s (1999) Post Pastoral idiom as the contextual frame for the remediation and use the original paintings of Benjamin William Leader (1831-1923) and John Constable (1776-1837), which have had green screen and 3D generated content added on top to interrupt their idyllic settings with contemporary symbols and narratives. Exhibited at Centrespace Gallery Bristol (2020) and research events including ‘Elastic Spaces’ (2017), ‘Imagined Faraway Lands’ (2019) and Bath Spa’s ‘We Make Stuff’ (2017), ‘Landscape/Composite’ altogether reveals new insights about the role of digital media practice in understanding new modes of intermediality, pushing forward interdisciplinary relationships between painting and film. The work also enables its audiences to question aspects of idyllic projection and ownership, land management, leisure uses and environmental issues, through the use of images.
In this presentation, I investigate how photographers can approach the Anthropocene and engage in the debates surrounding the naming of this human-made geological epoch. Particularly, following Robbins ́ definition of political ecology, I explore the extent to which the representation of the conditions of people, places and spaces in this new epoch are “power laden rather than politically inert” (2012, p.13). I argue that the representation of the Anthropocene by acclaimed environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky (2018) using its “industrial sublime formula” (Schuster, 2013) contributes to the depoliticization of the naming of the new geological epoch, as its images are characterized by political ambiguity, ignoring the Anthropocene’s colonial roots. Following from this, through the analysis of the photographic projects Tree People by Kovalainen and Seppo (2014) and Petrochemical America by Misrach and Orff (2014), I suggest two alternatives for environmental photography to engage with this new geological epoch: enquiring and imagining. These alternatives emerge from a decolonial understanding of the Anthropocene and the speculative and prefigurative endeavour that scholars such as Haraway (2016) and Gibson-Graham (Bird Rose et al., 2015) have undertaken to address it. Finally, following Dilnot´s definition of possibility (2015, quoted by Escobar, 2018) I propose that environmental photography can be used as a tool not to represent the Anthropocene but to negotiate with it, paving the way for a visual assessment and imagining of “other ways of being, doing and knowing” (Escobar, 2018) in the world.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the methodologies of deep mapping and printmaking to investigate the changing land use of the Slieve Aughty Mountains in the West of Ireland. Within this paper, I present a body of work situated in practice-based research that attempts to map and deconstruct a landscape that contains an accumulation of histories and temporalities, complex and intersectional, inhabited by multiple voices and narratives. Interpretation through multidisciplinary printmaking can present an alternative “kind of witnessing”(Nixon, 2013, p.15)in that printed narratives can imagine the unseen and imperceptible (Horn, 2019, p.3) as well as bearing witness to traces of change. The haptic nature of the printed surface is an avenue to make visible the interruptive force of slow violence and displacement in landscapes. This paper argues that the intentional gaze of the artist can activate (Ahrens, 2017, p. 28) landscapes of Anthropogenic significance and narratives of displacement through a considered aesthetic that integrates analogue and digital modes of practice.
Banner image by MC_Pitman on reddit.com
Patrick Laurie is a hill farmer and writer from Galloway. He is the best-selling author of the Wainwright Prize-nominated Native, and his ‘Bog and Myrtle Peat’ blog attracts around 30, 000 visitors a year. He is currently a mentor on the Pen and Plough creative writing programme for land workers. This interview with Dr Pippa Marland took place by email in April 2021.
Native recounts your return to Galloway to farm cattle after being involved in a number of other lines of work. Can you explain a bit about what made you decide to do this?
It was really important for me to make a life in Galloway, but it’s not easy finding work here. I trained as a gamekeeper when I left school, and that gave me a real taste for practical, hands-on conservation. Looking around me, it became clear that many of the most worrying declines in wildlife are closely linked to agricultural change, so it made sense to get stuck into an industry where I could really make the biggest difference. Despite strong family connections to agriculture, I began as a relative novice almost eight years ago and I’ve been on a very steep learning curve since then.