Centre for Environmental Humanities
One of the UK’s leading centres for research on the environmental humanities
Image: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:De_Waag_met_Brink.jpg
| Date: | 17th March 2022 |
| Time: | 13:30-16:30hrs |
| Venue: | Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam / Online via Zoom |
| Registration: | Please fill out the registration form below. (Free entry) |
During this interdisciplinary symposium the members of the VU-N.W.O. research project Omgaan met waterschaarste (Coping with drought, 2020-2025) will present some preliminary conclusions of their research.
The Centre for Environmental Humanities has received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to hold three workshops on key terms for effective interdisciplinary environmental research: resilience, justice, and transitions. In line with NERC’s Environmental Solutions agenda, our work will be focused on two environmental challenges that are salient in Bristol and the West of England: pollution (including carbon and biodiversity loss) and extreme weather events. These sessions will bring together researchers from disciplines including earth sciences, biology, engineering, history, cultural studies, neuropsychology, and law, as well as non-academic partners from the ClimateCultures network and local community organisations. We are also planning engage creative partners such as writers and artists to find new formats for interdisciplinary conversations, so that we do not simply ‘talk past’ each other. Building on previous knowledge exchange initiatives such as Bristol Method+ and the Bristol Advisory Committee on Climate Change, the workshops will seek to answer three principal questions:
1. What are the obstacles to effective interdisciplinary conversations around the key terms of justice, resilience, and transitions, and how can they be overcome?
2. How can better interdisciplinary understandings of these terms help local communities take action on pollution and extreme weather events?
3. How can these new understandings be shared with other relevant stakeholders, such as local authorities and funding bodies?
The outcomes will include a co-authored methodological paper, and a toolkit addressing how research funders, local authorities and other relevant stakeholders can support community initiatives and impact-focused interdisciplinary research in relation to the local challenges of pollution and extreme weather events. The precise format and design of the toolkit will emerge from discussions in the workshops, but may build on models such as the business model canvas. We will also work with creative partners to produce a proof-of-concept version of an online multi-perspective glossary of key terms for environmental research and engagement, to be hosted on the ClimateCultures website.
Any solutions or effective responses to climate change impacts will need large diverse groups of people to come together. For solutions to be found, active communication across different disciplines is needed – and this is not always easy! With this in mind, the workshops will be structured so as to include a variety of distinct activities, including presentations from academic participants, discussions led by community partners, and creative brainstorming sessions. There will be a particular focus on how to bring high level theories of justice, resilience and transitions into day to day work, and conversely how insights from the practices of non-academic organisations can inform interdisciplinary scholarly debate. How, for instance, do academic discussions of behavioural change relate to actual social practice?
We hope the workshops will at least begin to answer these questions. Watch this space for more details of the project, which will run from January – March 2022 (PI Dr Paul Merchant, Co-Is Professor Daniela Schmidt and Dr Alicia Gonzalez-Buelga).
James Palmer (School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol) introduces a new collection of essays, The Work That Plants Do: Life, Labour and the Future of Vegetal Economies (Transcript, 2021).
Are we living in a vegetal world? Plants are increasingly recognised as sensate, communicative, world-making beings. At the same time, more hope than ever is being pinned on them to address environmental, social and economic challenges – whether through rising interest in nature-based climate solutions, plant-based diets, biotechnological innovations, or beyond. What kinds of connections exist between these philosophical and instrumental views of plant agency? And what relations do they bear to the crisis of capitalism?
In a new collection co-edited by Marion Ernwein (The Open University) and two Bristol geographers – Franklin Ginn and James Palmer – environmental humanities scholars from the UK, US, France and Australia shine a critical light on evolving understandings of the nature and potentials of vegetal life under contemporary capitalism. Drawing on diverse case studies, The Work That Plants Do asks what kinds of work plants do in capitalist economies today. Contributors to the book investigate the fraught processes through which plants are turned into commodities, put to work, or enrolled in projects of social and environmental reproduction. Specific chapters delve into cases ranging from the craft horticultural practices undergirding annual ‘Wisteria Festivals’ in Japan through to laboratory-based succulent conservation in the US, and from the metabolic activities of grape vines in the capitalist viticulture through to the ‘shady work’ performed by urban trees in the increasingly overheated urban environments of north Australia.
If a core ambition of the book is to explore the theoretical and political implications of diverse recognitions of plant agency in contemporary capitalism, an equally central concern is to insist that plants’ alterity – their difference – makes a difference. To attend critically to the capacities of plants is, the book aims to show, not simply a case of extending the existing tools of critical political economy or multispecies studies to a new empirical domain. Rather, the book suggests that plants require new concepts and ways of thinking – about work and labour, about the driving purpose of economies themselves, and indeed about the relationships that should operate between productivity and vitality, growth and life.
Ultimately, the book argues that a closer attention to the heterogenous agencies of plants might serve not only to enrich understandings of capitalism itself, but potentially also to catalyse new forms of resistance to its logics.
The Work That Plants Do: Life, Labour and the Future of Vegetal Economies is published by transcript Verlag and can be purchased directly from the publisher or via their US distributor, Columbia University Press.
Contributors:
Dr Davina Quinilivan (Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol) introduces her forthcoming book, Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration, a blend of nature-writing, magical realism and memoir, which will be published by Little Toller in Spring 2022.
I am born of a colonial past and indigenous tribeswomen from Burma. I fashion new things from these old maps. Here and there. Different orientations. I do not name these new continents: the only gesture to the language of naming is the word ‘Shalimar’.
My book is an account of a period during which my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, my departure from our family home with my husband, the varying rural places we lived in the Home Counties, transitory, as I wrote my PhD thesis, and the imagined memories and stories which helped shape my perception of the world. It is a song, a lyric-memory, a fever-dream. Like the work of the lungs, this story is about the breathing in of a new continent: a meditation on the ever shifting nature of ‘home’ which is hopeful and new. Like the symmetry of the lungs, this book is divided into two parts: the story of the ten years I lived through the loss of my father, and the thoughts I’ve had about cinema and literature, the ‘second breaths’ I have taken as a writer after this period in my life. As postscript, it ends with a reflection on Devon, our new home, the place where I intend to lay my father’s ashes after ten years, in the summer of 2020.
Implied by the subheading which refers to ‘Place and Migration’ is this books’ investment in forms of navigation, orientation and exploration. In other words, more intimate geographies. Imagine Madame Scudery’s 17th century French map of an imaginary land, a ‘Carte du tendre’ (a map of tender). My map is both real and abstract, expressed through my reflections on journeying into Deep England, moving out of our family home, and narratives, impressions and ‘field notes’ which form a way towards a new ‘orientation’ of identity.
In ‘The English Patient’, Michael Ondaatje tells a story strongly rooted in the interrogation of imperialism, ownership, naming, Colonial identity and the fault lines of those systems which prove to be corrosive for his protagonists, a collective who must find new expression through tragic losses and indelible scars. Sensuous and sensory, the body has its own intelligence and this transcends all of language. It is no wonder Katherine chooses to entertain her husband’s exploration team with an ancient tale from Herodotus, the story of Candaules and the ring which makes its wearer invisible. To make the body invisible is the greatest act of imperialism, an expression of power which erases what is written on the body, or remembered through the skin. There is no sand, nor desert drift, in my own book, instead, there are forests and fields. Everything is a racking of vision at close-range, because my hand is better than any cartographic illusion. For some, this might come to represent a form of psycho-geography which the art historian Giuliana Bruno writes of in her book ‘Atlas of Emotion’ in which knowledge is embedded in the senses and vision is implicated in sensory experience; her pyscho-geographical analyses reflect a kind of lived experience of space that is antithetical to the penetrating, scopophilic gaze of Bauderlaire’s flaneur.
Curiosity came to signify a particular desire to know, which, for a period, was encouraged constantly to move, expanding in different directions. Such cognitive desire implies a mobilization that is drift. It is not only implicated in the sensation of wonder . . . but located in the experience of wander
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion
I am a daughter of generations of Colonials, complicated by the knowledge that the women in my family, my great-grandmothers, descend from ethnic minorities, indigenous tribes and diasporas from Burma and India, Portuguese Kerala and the Shan hills. Within this history is the fact that my grandfathers were powerful colonials, from France, Germany and England. So, naturally, I immediately likened my father to Almasy, as he lay dying and speaking in an accented voice, English and Exotic (they called him Yul Brenner in the hospital). Yet, it is rather me who has become this mercurial figure. I have, finally, reckoned with that here.
In my younger days, I sought kinship, of any kind, and wisdom through the writings of Hanif Kureishi, Bidisha, Arundhati Roy (I bought The God of Small Things with a school book token) and Zadie Smith (a few years older than me and also from West London), then, bell hooks, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward Said. In my late twenties, my father died and through this loss came a deeper exploration, an archaeological unearthing, of ‘home’, of entangled life and maps, journeys and territories, notably as I wondered, gypsy-like, at odds with everything, as I navigated through Deep England.
I started writing this book in the winter of 2011. By this point, and prior to my final migration to Devon, with my young family, we had moved several times though Surrey and Berkshire, sporadically interrupted with visits to Suffolk, Norfolk and Kent, reading Roger Deakin and Celia Fiennes, Jini Lash’s Suffolk Song Cycle, Ronald Blythe’s Arkenfield, Derek Jarman and Sylvia Plath. In Surrey, I found myself in a forest for the first time in my life. In Hampshire, I encountered the rituals of rural life including wassailing and grand corridors of oak trees which sheltered me as I breast-fed our first child. In Devon, I met a shepherd and women whispering into the lichen on an old ash tree as we recovered from a disastrous move, a difficult time doubled back and tightened further by the global pandemic which spread in 2020. Through all these things, I learned about trees and moss, red soil and acorns trodden by ruby red herds of cows, things which in their own, small symphony of life, enabled a sense of futurity. This is how we make new maps.
An extract from the book features in the Arts Council funded literary journal The Willowherb Review, edited by Jessica J. Lee, a peer-reviewed publication which brings together writers from under represented communities.
Spring 2020 will be remembered for the global Covid-19 pandemic. While in Britain people were ordered to stay at home in a national lockdown, the nation also experienced its longest run of coal-free energy generation since the Industrial Revolution – 68 days of coal-free power. This wasn’t unconnected: as the economy shrunk almost overnight some of the major industrial energy uses stopped; steady low usage meant that the ‘back-up’ coal-fired generators of the national grid weren’t needed. Nor was this fossil-free: oil, alongside nuclear and gas, continued to fuel power plants. But, more than ever before, our energy was produced by renewable sources, and on 26 August 2020, the National Grid recorded the highest every contribution by wind to the national electricity mix: 59.9%.
This shift out of fossil dependence is both a historic moment, and the product of historical processes. The technological and scientific work that underpins the development of efficient turbines has taken decades – and it is what I’ve written about in my article, ‘When’s a gale a gale? Understanding wind as an energetic force in mid-twentieth century Britain’, out now in Environmental History. I look at how interest in the wind as a potential energy source (by the British state, and state scientists), generated the need for knowledge about how wind worked. Turbine technology needs airspace to operate, but it also needs land – to ground the turbines in, to connect to the grid by – and people to install and operate the devices. And so when looking at energy landscapes, we really need to think beyond the technology and consider the people and places with which it interacts, to understand how energy is produced and used.
This was certainly the case for understanding wind energy. In 1940s and 50s Britain, scientists surveyed the wind regime at a national scale for the first time. They relied on the help and cooperation of local people to do this. In the brief mentions of this assistance in the archival record, we gain insight into the importance of embodied, localised knowledge in scientific processes which can at first seem detached from the actual landscapes of study.
The surveys determined Orkney as the best place to situate a test turbine. Embodied knowledge, knowledge that is learnt from being in place and from place, is very tangible in accounts of a hurricane which hit Orkney in 1952, during the turbine tests. By looking at how the islanders made sense of a disastrous wind, and brought the turbine technology into their narratives of the storm, we learn that it is not only electricity generated by the development of renewable energy, but also new dimensions to place-based knowledge and identities.
Seeing beyond the technology to consider its interactions with environments and societies is something that the energy humanities considers as essential. I’ll be working on this subject from this perspective for some time to come, and would love to hear your thoughts on the article.
–Marianna (@DudleyMarianna)
Dr Marianna Dudley is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol. She was a founding co-director of the Centre for Environmental Humanities.
There is an ancient and powerful relationship between grieving, singing and lyric language.
Author, musician and academic Robert Macfarlane will be exploring the roles of music and poetry at times of grief and loss.
Robert’s conversation is organised by Dr Lesel Dawson (Department of English) as part of the Good Grief Festival.
For more information, and to book, visit the Good Grief Festival website.
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)
