Steps Toward a Syllabus for Public Environmental Humanities

2019 Mellon Summer Fellowship Workshop

Jason Groves

Preface and User’s Guide

I want to preface materials by acknowledging that this course is in a very early stage of preparation and that I will be very receptive to your suggestions, concerns, critiques, etc. I have a fairly long runway to figure out the shape, expectations, and outcomes of a course whose current form is that of the survey or catch-all (with the obvious qualification that it does not try to be, nor can be, exhaustive) and which is intended to develop capacities for public scholarship particularly for graduate students interested in cross-, trans- or interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities (ecocriticism, environmental philosophy, environmental history, ecopsychology, etc.).

Rather than asking you to read any particular reading, I’ve linked to a number of pieces (essays, podcasts, field guides, etc.) that are online. Please click on a few that you find appealing or intriguing. I take inspiration from many of the assigned projects, and so I’d just ask you to think about if could be adapted for this class as assignments or instrumentalized in other ways. Some of the more celebrated, but still scrappy examples: Dear Climate posters, letters, and meditations; Walking Lab projects; A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting.

I also want to announce my discussant, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, Assistant Professor of Equity and Environmental Justice in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, whom I’ll introduce on Tuesday and whose bio is here: https://smea.uw.edu/faculty/cleo-woelfle-erskine-ph-d/. I particularly want to highlight Cleo and July’s Ecopoetics Along Shorelines undergraduate course: https://shorelinepoetics.com

My Background

Working from 2013 to 2018 with educators, scientists, exhibit designers, illustrators, and artists at the Exploratorium Museum of Art, Science and Human Perception, has probably the single most transformative set of experiences for my scholarship. (And all of that can be traced back to 1) showing up (as the single member of the “public”) on a public multi-day walk that they hosted in 2013 and then shortly thereafter 2) publishing a blog post about that walk that led to a number of opportunities and affiliations with that institution.) Other experiences: participation in numerous facilitated walks (blogged about two here); participating in a field study on species extinction with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality that co-generated novel vocabularies; taking part in a site-specific workshop (with BARGE (The Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics) as part of the 2013 Ecopoetics Conference at Berkeley and which was formative for a walking tour of the Exploratorium that I co-designed. Since I’ve been in Seattle, I’ve organized a number of excursions with public artists and public scholars (though my co-organized Simpson Center-funded Cross-disciplinary Cluster on The Anthropocene), including two tours of the Duwamish River facilitated by the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition (DRCC). Which is all to say that while this work involves a rethinking of methodologies and practices of presenting knowledge, it does not “transform the structure of cultural authority” (see Mary Mullen quote below). This is something I’d like to rethink with this course, though I’ve not yet determined how to go about this and with whom.

Some Working Definitions

Public Scholarship names “projects that promote collaboration between scholars and community partners in education, governmental, non-profit, and grassroots organizations.” (Simpson Center)

“The environmental humanities is a term for a range of multifaceted scholarly approaches that understand environmental challenges as inextricable from social, cultural and human factors” (Neimanis, Astrida, et al. “Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities: Toward Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene.” Ethics and the Environment, vol. 20, no. 1, 2015, pp. 67–97, here p. 70). 

“Going forward [in the environmental humanities], however, effort must increasingly be made to move beyond ecocriticism to ecoaction, mobilizing (radical) change ‘on the ground,’ be it in the form of actively spreading counternarratives or (re)building healthy communities and places.” (Rich Hutchings, “Understanding of and Vision for the Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, 2014, pp. 213-220, here p. 214.)

“Environmentalism is often understood as universal and postracial, whereas environmental justice is seen as primarily, if not exclusively, concerned with racial equity. By contrast, we argue that race is inextricable from our understandings of ecology, and vice versa. […] This perspective allows for a broad definition of ecology, one that includes urban environments and agricultural systems. We consider nature and environment as relational sites for navigating both embodied racial identities and ecological space and place. Our use of the term racial ecologies instead of the more static term environment references these systems that shift and change over time but are always intertwined.” (LeiLani Nishime and Kim Hester Williams, “Introduction” to Racial Ecologies, U of Washington P, 2018, pp. 3-4).

A Note and Some Caveats About the “Public Environmental Humanities”

As far as academic labels go, the “Environmental Humanities” has only emerged in the past ten years or so as a combination of “humanistic perspectives and methods that have already developed in half a dozen or so disciplines over the last four decades” (Ursula Heise). “Public Environmental Humanities” is an even more recent label associated with the work of the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities, LENS (The Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies) at UCLA, the Center for Environmental Futures at the University of Oregon, various initiatives at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and the Sydney Environment Institute. Adopting this label as the course title means that I’m buying into this institutional branding exercise but I also want to mark 1) how, for all of the novelty of these labels, the kinds of work it describes is simply called “scholarship” in other disciplines and also 2) how it has some of its roots outside of the academy. I’m thinking of this Farah Jasmine Griffin’s thoughts on the black arts movement in “Public Humanities: Crisis and Possibility” and I’m also thinking about how nearly all of the work on ecology and the environment that I’ve encountered in AIS and Indigenous Studies could be identified as “Public Environmental Humanities” scholarship- though that label is never invoked and would probably be redundant. In sum, there is a concerning #Columbusizing aspect of the “Public Environmental Humanities,” but my hope is that once the non-novelty of that work is exposed, the more problematic aspect of the title might drop away. I also want to mark the historically exclusive “public” of environmentalism and environmental work, well-detailed in Sarah Jaquette Ray’s The Ecological Other, which recounts the xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and ableism that constituted many prominent forms of modern U.S. environmentalism. To address this I want to think about, and possibly foreground, a counterpublic environmental humanities and how it might expose problematic assumptions of the “public good’ in the context of US and European environmentalisms. Nicola Seymour’s recent Bad Environmentalism would likely be useful here, as well as Michael Warner’s work on counterpublics. Less easily negotiable are the challenges raised by Mary Mullen in “Public Humanities’ (Victorian) Culture Problem.” Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 183-204. Though not about the public environmental humanities per se, the criticisms seem particularly acute in this field.

Because these programs often function as a way for graduate students ‘to diversify their professional portfolios’ so they are not restricted to the academic job search, these initiatives often confuse the goals of the program: to create new markets for humanities Ph.D. students or to expand democracy. Instead of opening up space for public engagement, these projects professionalize it in ways that delegitimize other forms of cultural and civic engagement – such as grassroots social movements or organizations at odds with the state – as they accept rather than question the logic of marketization. (193)

Does this need to be an either/or situation? I will confess that the logic of marketization informs this graduate seminar, but so do the claims of environmental justice. Does the one need to cancel the other? Particularly insistent is Mullen’s claim that the public humanities extend the cultural authority of institutions, especially the university, “without changing who is able to participate in and shape this very authority” (186):

For if these methodologies and practices change how scholars present knowledge and the topics they discuss, they do not transform the structure of cultural authority, which ultimately privileges institutions rather than communities, detachment rather than engagement and public humanities rather than public culture. (186)

This has been particularly pertinent for environmental and ecological issues, but as our guest from 350.org mentioned, structures of authority are rapidly changing in environmental activism. It is my hope that the readings are not as invested in securing the authority of the university and preserving existing cultural hierarchies as Mullen suggests.

Organization of Readings

I’ve organized the course around three loosely-defined sites of work in the environmental humanities: writing and publishing; curating and collecting; and performing and organizing. For the purposes of this ten-week course, Site #1 encompasses the blog, the field guide, the lexicon, the manifesto, the podcast (thanks Chelsea), comix and sequential graphic art (thanks Meshell), and the earthwork; Site #2 encompasses the archive, the library, the film series, the museum, and the conservation site; Site #3 encompasses the facilitated walk, the guided tour, and the protest (and other forms of public activism, thanks Jess). This course has a two-fold focus: it is a content-based survey of / introduction to the theory and practice of the environmental humanities and an invitation to students to develop, or continue to develop, their own public scholarly practices.

Sample Readings

Week 1: Publics, Environments, Humanities

• Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics”

• Hannes Bergthaller et al., “Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities(2014) 5 (1): 261-276.

• LeiLani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams, “Introduction: Why Racial Ecologies?” Racial Ecologies, edited by LeiLani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams

• Camille T. Dungy, “Introduction: The Nature of African American Poetry.” Black Nature, edited by Camille T. Dungy.

• Rich Hutchings, “Understanding of and Vision for the Environmental Humanities”

• Jesse Peterson, “Doing environmental humanities: inter/transdisciplinary research through an underwater 360° video poem”

Week 2-3: Publishing

• Marina Zurkow et al., “Dear Climate” (posters, meditations, letters)

• Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies, “A Field Guide to Whale Creek”

• Chadwick Allen, “Re-scripting Indigenous America: Earthworks in Native Art, Literature, Community”

• Marco Armiero et al. “Toxic Bios: Toxic Autobiographies—A Public Environmental Humanities Project”

• Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Brent Ryan Bellamy, An Ecotopian Lexicon

• PPEH Lab, Ecotopian Toolkit, 2018 Projects.

• Jason M. Kelly and Fiona P. McDonald, editors. The Anthropocene Primer.

• The Bureau of Linguistical Reality lexicon

• Data Refuge, Data Remediations Podcast

• Ecofeminist Fridays Manifestx

Week 4-5 Curating, Collecting (and Conserving)

• Fred Wilson, “Mining the Museum”

• The Center for Postnatural History Welcome Video

• Gregg Mitman, et al. Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene.

• Fiona Cameron and Brett Neilson, editors. Climate Change and Museum Futures

• Amy Balkin et al. A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting.

• Jessica Hernandez, “Environmental Justice in the Pacific Northwest: Developing an Atlas & Website to Identify Indigenous Pillars of Environmental Justice for Policy Recommendations”

• Jessica Hernandez, “Indigenizing Urban Seattle” podcast

• The Simpson Center’s Anthropocene Film Salon

Week 6-7 Performing and Organizing

• Yates McKee, “On Flooded Streets and Breathing-in-Common: Climate Justice, Black Lives Matter, and the Arts of Decolonization”

• Raoul E. Pandya, “Community-Driven Research in the Anthropocene”

• Liberate Tate, “Confronting the Institution in Performance”

• Composting Feminisms Reading Group

• David B. Williams, Seattle Walks: Discoverying History and Nature in the City

• WalkingLab (Stephanie Springgay, Sarah E. Truman, et al.), various projects: Toxic Love / Making-with-Windermere Basin; Stone Walks Lancaster: Militarisms, migration, and speculative geology; Indelible Refusal; Queering Deep Time (Stone Walks: Edinburgh)

• Stephanie Springgay, Sarah E. Truman “Queer Walking Tours and the affective contours of place”; “Research-Creation Walking Methodologies and an Unsettling of Time”

• Amir Sheikh et al., The Waterlines Project

• Sarah Kanouse, “Critical Day Trips”

• Studio for Urban Projects, “Field Notes: Observing Lake Union” 

Week 8+ Project Development

I’d like to build in at least three weeks for students to develop projects. Class meetings would still be structured but in a way that allowed progress to be made on projects.

Potential Partners/ Excursion Destinations

The Center for Creative Conservation at the UW

Urban@UW

The Carlson Center

The Burke Museum

The Henry Art Gallery

Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition and Duwamish River Festival

Amplifier

David Williams

Gas Works Park

Notes on Assignments and Activities

I will develop collaborative assignments (among students) in conjunction with each unit, but I am not yet sure what shape the final project will take. One option would be to workshop a collaborative speculative public environmental humanities project at the outset of class and to then have groups realize an aspect or multiple aspects of that project in the course. I anticipate students having widely varying levels of familiarity with public scholarship, and for this class to be the most useful and supportive coursework will need to be somewhat individualized. I see this course as developing students’ capacities for public scholarship, whether that be through an introduction to these conversations and practices or through the facilitation of existing work and projects.

Right now I’m collecting examples of plug-and-play activities that could be adapted for our contexts:

• Weekly blog posts

• Read-ins à la Ecofeminist Fridays

• Facilitated walks à la Walking Lab

• Field guide to a neglected or overlooked environment à la The Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies’ Field Guide to Whale Creek

• ?

Evaluating Projects and Partnerships in Public Environmental Humanities

(After “Sample Heuristic: Evaluating Projects and Partnerships in Prison Education”)