This page showcases some of the collaborative and creative work done under the Centre’s auspices. Individual researchers’ outputs can be found here on the University of Bristol website.
An Excursion in the Environmental Humanities
In summer 2018, members of the University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities made a day trip to the Island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel. In this collectively produced article, participants from this trip reflect on the encounter with the island, the experience of excursing with colleagues, and the questions that both processes have raised in relation to our scholarly identities. In keeping with recent scholarship in the environmental humanities (EH), we make a case for the importance of visiting the places we study, even for just a short period of time. But we also recognise the limitations of fieldwork within the EH and suggest that the process of community building is often just as important as the additional insights gained from visiting a place. Our trip to Lundy involved the double excursion of geographical and disciplinary travel from home. Without really intending it, our choice of an island location helped to create connections between the physical and intellectual elements of our journey. Going to Lundy encouraged us to reflect on questions of boundedness and connectedness; identity and belonging; isolation and community; and how disciplinary habits both frame and unsettle our responses to a new place. This might be characterised as an exercise in provocative dislocation.
We published our reflections on the expedition in leading environmental humanities journal Green Letters.
Adrian Howkins, Marianna Dudley, Peter Coates, Tamsin Badcoe, Sage Brice, Andy Flack, Daniel Haines, Paul Merchant, Laurence Publicover, Richard Stone & Alice Would (2019) An excursion in the environmental humanities: some thoughts on fieldwork, collaboration, and disciplinary identity following a day trip to the Island of Lundy, Green Letters, 23:1, 39-53, DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2019.1593211
Remembrance Day for Lost Species: Special Issue for The Clearing magazine
‘Poetry can repair no loss,’ John Berger writes, ‘but it defies the space which separates.’ Funded by the Centre and edited by member Michael Malay, this 2018 special issue of The Clearing brings together seven writers to mark the Remembrance Day of Lost Species. Although they respond to the grief and disorientation of our times, these pieces are not eulogies. Rather, they are songs of hope and memory, commitment and renewal. They mark the immensity of current and past losses, but defiantly — by bridging the ‘space which separates.’
1. ‘Tallgrass, by Robin Kimmerer’
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/tallgrass-by-robin-wall-kimmerer/
2. ‘Vultures on the Brink, by Anita Roy’
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/vultures-on-the-brink-by-anita-roy/
3. ‘Words of Life, by Nicholas Evans’
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/poetry/words-of-life-by-nicholas-evans/
4. ‘On Extinction, by Tim Ingold’
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/on-extinction-by-tim-ingold/
5. ‘The Broken Frame, by Pippa Marland’
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/the-broken-frame-by-pippa-marland/
6. ‘A Dark Dim Smudge, by Melanie Challenger’
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/a-dim-dark-smudge-by-melanie-challenger/
7. ‘The New Wild, by Anna Tsing’
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/the-new-wild-by-anna-tsing/