environmental humanities – Centre for Environmental Humanities

Every year on the MA Environmental Humanities we plan fields trips for our students, which are embedded into our core ‘Introduction’ and ‘Themes’ units. We see lots of benefits to incorporating field trips, which are not typically teaching activities in the Humanities (but are common in eg. Geography and Earth Sciences).

In the Centre for Environmental Humanities, we value field trips as a research method and plan at least one a year (see here). Bringing them into our taught programme is a good way of connecting our research and teaching. Field trips offer an opportunity for the group to get to know each other better, and as our field trips are local, it’s also a chance for those new to Bristol to explore and for residents to see familiar places with fresh, EH-focused, eyes.

This year’s first field trip has become a firm favourite. We join Mathilde Braddock of Steps in Stone on a ‘Rivers Old and New’ walk along the Frome on the eastern edge of Bristol. The walk takes us through woodland along amazing rock formations and Mathilde shows us how to see traces of recent and ancient history in the stone.

Fig. 1 Mathilde teaches us to see like a geologist. All photographs by Marianna Dudley.

Mathilde relates the deep time histories which have shaped the geology, and gives us a chance to think about the role of storytelling in communicating environmental stories.

Prompted by Mathilde, we also practice some creative responses to the places we find ourselves in. This year the creative writing practice felt particularly rewarding, and the words below have been shared by two current students on the course. The prompts, sunny autumn riverbank setting, and the quiet, collective moment shared with the group helped me to write a poem, something I’ve not really done before. I’m increasingly interested in exploring how creative practices help us to not just communicate, but also to think in new ways about our subject(s), and I look forward to exploring this with the MA Environmental Humanities students more. Thanks, students, and Mathilde, for a great walk.

– Dr Marianna Dudley, MA Environmental Humanities Programme Director

Fig. 3. Rae holds the dust of ancient deserts in her hand (now friable sandstone).

Rae Ferner-Rose

Stones.

I think often of an early death. In deep time the difference between twenty-two and one hundred is the blink of an eye. How can we ever say that humans are the only true agent within nature when one rainfall can leave a footprint more significant than any one person is able? But when I rot down into the earth, I feel my real work will begin. My life as a fossil will be my greatest achievement, against all my superficial moments of profound, the record making potential of my remains is beyond any word I could leave with this mouth or any word I could write with these hands. After breath and before the end of the world I will be content as a letter in a story so much larger than myself.

In Judaism it is customary to leave a stone on a grave instead of flowers. Flowers die but stone can be carried into the afterlife. I like to think that in some time, the body I leave behind will have more to share with stone than flowers. Flowers are beautiful but transient, like life, but like death – lasting, meaningful, quiet – stone will carry me away into a time my body will understand in a way my embodied mind could never dream of. In health I feel like a flower in bloom, vibrant and alive but always with a view to wilting. In illness I felt like stone, static, peaceful ever closer and closer to the earth. Somewhere between twenty-two and a hundred I will drift back to that earth I arrived from. I do not dream of immortality but rather, living forever.

Jo Ram

It’s just so comforting walking around and looking, and also being taught how to look. That is what elders and teachers are for. To see a blank stoneface no longer blank. But there is a tension I feel between having to learn all the knowledge, to have expertise in order to connect and between feeling an emptiness when all that knowledge becomes facts rather than a way of knowing. Do we need to know all the facts to have a knowing? Do we need some facts? How many and how much facts do we need to start knowing? Or are facts at all relevant to knowing? But if it weren’t for facts, how do we know we are in the knowing? What is the practice of the knowing?

Marianna Dudley

Four seconds to midnight

is when we appeared

says the geologist, bending

time with her words.

Twenty-four hours of life on earth

most of it behind us

time spent in vastness.

Mountains, faults

delta plains awash with

flora, air dense with

oxygen, soil solid with

carbon. Dragonflies with wings

like birds, dragon-birds

dart through the density

we would never believe they lived

if we could not see them

in the stone.

Mathilde Braddock

I’ve always felt a particular magic in the cliff faces, towering trees and unassuming flow of the river in the Frome valley. For the second year in a row, I’ve seen this magic envelop the Environmental Humanities MA students and witnessed how sharing the deep time stories of the land opens us to greater wonder for the world. I am humbled by the words which the students and teachers share in response to the rocks, the river, the stories I tell, and the simple act of pausing and listening, together.

Offering this walk as part of the MA is a pleasure because it feels like the perfect fit: an eager and open-minded audience, an opportunity for them to get out and about, and a chance for us all to feel connected with our shared environment.

Fig. 4. A parting message from the Frome.

Kirk Sides has been awarded a “Futures” Fellowship by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

From February to May, Kirk will be in residence at the Carson Center in Munich and working on a chapter titled “Eco-Futurism: Mythopoiesis, Science Fiction, and the African Anthropocene.” This work forms part of a current book manuscript, African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures, which explores the relationship between ecological forms of writing and decolonial thought in African literary and cultural production across the twentieth century. The book charts a long history of ecological thinking in cultural production from across the African continent, tracing how anti-colonial writing of the early twentieth century prefigured contemporary turns towards speculative and science fiction for thinking about global climate change and planetary futures.

While in residence Kirk will also be contributing to both the Centre Fellows’ Colloquia as well as to the Center’s blog.

African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures explores the relationship between environmental thinking and anti-colonial politics in African literary and cultural production across the twentieth century, andargues for expanded historical timelines for thinking about the environment in African literature, film and artistic production. While much of the ecocritical historicism looking to the African continent begins with the mid-twentieth century moment of political independence and decolonization, my project makes the case for much earlier forms of ecological thinking that informed writing from the continent from at least the start of the twentieth century. In turn, these earlier articulations of ecological awareness often functioned as the basis for formulations of anti-colonial politics. The project begins by charting a long history of ecological thinking beginning with the cultural production from anti-colonial writing of the early twentieth century, and then focuses on contemporary turns towards speculative and science fiction for thinking climate change and planetary futures. Focusing on literary texts, political discourses, as well as filmic and artistic production, African Anthropocene argues that various cultural archives from the African continent display a history of ecological awareness that long predates the moment of political independence and subsequent decolonization of the mid-twentieth century. The turn to ecocriticism in the fields of African humanities broadly and African literatures more specifically has been relatively recent, and these studies are also characteristically marked by their chronologies, which re-inscribe a postcolonial historiography to the emergence of an environmental awareness in African literary and cultural production. My project, on the other hand, begins at the start of the twentieth century and demonstrates how authors and intellectuals on the African continent at this time were already deeply invested in ecological understandings of local places. In turn, these ecological writings are the basis for early and often nascent forms of anti-colonial politics which predate the more popularized expressions of the mid-twentieth century and the moment political independence.

African Anthropocene also argues that by looking at the ways in which environmental relationships are encoded through practices of storytelling we are able to see how returns to mythology and creation stories often function as forms for imagining possible ecological futures. My research traces a genealogy of African environmental thought, which I argue is an ecological imaginary that is both deeply historical, especially in its accessing of mythological registers, but is also oriented towards planetary futures through its increasing turns towards science/speculative fiction. African science fiction is indeed a productive imaginary to think through the ecological potentialities of the Anthropocene for the African continent in the contemporary moment. But what I call ‘eco-futurism’ in the project is a mode that has also been employed by earlier generations of African writers. I argue that the ecological imagination in African literature, and its framing through science or speculative fiction, or even “speculative fabulation” as Donna Haraway calls it, has a much longer history within writing from the continent. I read the African Anthropocene as a mode where environmental precarity and the possibilities of life on a damaged earth become the tropes for writing both colonial pasts, but also the futures of the African continent. Reading for eco-futurism in African literatures, I will also link the post-apocalyptical and environmental futurism of recent writers such as Nnedi Okorafor to earlier generations of African writers such as Thomas Mofolo, Bessie Head, and Amos Tutuola, who were equally invested in an ecological imaginary which was itself routed through ontologies of the futuristic, the mythical and the fabulist. Eco-futurism is a way to re-read the history of African literature as deeply invested in mapping ecologies of the continent in which the future might be imagined differently. By looking at earlier expressions of political ecological histories in African writing, I am able to argue for a rethinking and expansion of received genealogies of decolonization on the continent.

Dr Kirk Sides is a Lecturer in World Literatures in English in the Department of English at the University of Bristol.

Header image: Rachel Carson Center

Tag: environmental humanities

Rivers Old and New: Field Trips as Teaching Method in the MA Environmental Humanities

Rachel Carson Center Fellowship Success for Kirk Sides