Category: Research projects

New book: Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages by Lucy Donkin

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Dr Lucy Donkin (History of Art, University of Bristol) has published a new book on holy ground in the middle ages.

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in medieval western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces.

The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Lucy Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities.

Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people’s identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.

Cornell University Press are offering a discount of 30% using the code CSVS2022 at combinedacademic.co.uk.

Enrique Ramírez: sea thinking

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CEH co-director Paul Merchant, writes on his blog…

In early April, I spoke to the artist Enrique Ramírez, whose work returns again and again to the ocean as a source of inspiration, a place for reflection, and a material with which to make art. Ramírez was born in Santiago de Chile, but has lived and worked between Paris and Santiago since 2010.

Ramírez told me that he feels like a Chilean artist when he is outside Chile, but that when he returns to his home country, he feels like something of a tourist. This sense of displaced identity emerges in his work: much of it has to do with the particular political significance of the sea in Chile, but Ramírez also makes art that explores travel and migration across oceans, as well as ecological problems that ignore national borders.

[Read more…]

What does it mean? Keywords for interdisciplinary environmental research and engagement

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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).

Energy landscapes and the generative power of place

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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.

Hauling wind measuring equipment up Costa Hill, Orkney. In E.H. Golding and A.H. Stodhart, ‘The selection and characteristics of wind-power sites’ (The Electrical Research Association, 1952). Met Office Archive.

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.

Costa Hill from the coast path. Photograph by Marianna Dudley, 2017.

–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.

Rewilding, Wilding, and the New Georgic in Contemporary Nature Writing: a new paper by Pippa Marland

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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)

Read the full paper here.

Creative Environments workshop: call for contributions

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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):

  • presentations showcasing examples of academic collaboration with artists and creative practitioners, or the use of creative research methodologies
  • readings or performances of material created as a result of such collaborations
  • (audio)visual materials to be displayed at the conference venue and online
  • theoretical reflections on the co-production of knowledge 

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

Public environmental history by student historian, Kate Sudakova

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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.

CfP – Storied Deserts: Re-Imagining Arid Environments

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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:

  • Ecocritical approaches to deserts
  • Cinema, media and visual studies
  • Speculative projects
  • Land stewardship
  • The Anthropocene and climate change
  • Displacement, diaspora
  • Desertification and dust-bowlification
  • Science Fiction
  • Cultural geographies
  • Indigenous studies
  • Studies of place and space
  • Placemaking and placekeeping
  • Ethnographic approaches
  • Political geology / geologies of race
  • Afrofuturism
  • Water management
  • Extractive industries
  • Post-apocalyptic and dystopian landscapes
  • Desert ecologies
  • Cultural studies
  • Decolonial/Anti-colonial approaches
  • Phenomenology and environmental philosophy

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).

4 PhD positions at Wageningen on Riverhood: Living rivers and new water justice movements

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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?

Continue reading here.

An Interview with Patrick Laurie

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Reblogged from the Pen and the Plough

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.

Read more on the Pen and the Plough