KAJAK/Inimkond special roundtable debate on environmental humanities

KAJAK/Inimkond special roundtable debate on 

Environmental humanities: limits and potentials of (un)disciplined research on human-environment relations.

Tallinn University, Narva mnt. 25, Mare building, room M 648
28 April 2014, 6-8 p.m. / Welcome coffee from 5.30 p.m.

Participation in this event is free of charge, but registration is required until 15 April. To register, please go to http://tinyurl.com/pkg2z65

For further info, please see https://www.facebook.com/events/1433801966863235/

Environmental humanities is a growing field in research and teaching internationally – and also at Tallinn University. The field seeks to find new ways of studying, understanding and engaging with environmental issues through an inter- or transdisciplinary approach inspired by environmental history, ecological anthropology, ecocriticism, human geography, biosemiotics and other approaches. But what does the label “environmental humanities” actually describe? In what ways does an “environmental humanities” approach enrich our research, and in what ways does it hamper our understanding of human-environment relations and contemporary ecological problems? Is environmental humanities the way to success or should we stay within our disciplinary borders?

In order to address these questions, we invite you to participate in a roundtable debate with five speakers whose work may be described as environmental humanities, but whose disciplinary and regional backgrounds are rather different. The speakers will discuss the pros and cons of (un-/inter-/trans-)disciplinary research in relation to particular instances of their own work on environmental issues. 

The roundtable speakers will be:

Hannes Bergthaller is an associate professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chung-Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan. His monograph Populäre Ökologie on the literature and cultural history of modern environmentalism in the US appeared in 2007 (in German); the essay collection Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and US Cultures (co-edited with Carsten Schinko) was published in 2011. He has published articles on a range of subjects including US literature; ecocritical theory; environmental literature, film, and photography. His primary research interests are ecocriticism, US literature and cultural history, and social systems theory. He is a founding member of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE), as whose president he currently serves.

Michael Egan is a historian at McMaster University, Canada, whose work revolves around the histories of science, technology, environment, and the future. His research agenda focuses on the relationship between science and the environment. He is the author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007), and co-editor (with Jeff Crane) Natural Protest: Essays on the History of American Environmentalism (Routledge, 2008). A second co-edited volume with Jeff Crane, The Politics of Hope: Ecological Democracy in America, is under contract with the University Press of Colorado. He has also published widely in environmental history and on the environmental justice movement. He is director of the Sustainable Future History Project and series editor of “History for a Sustainable Future,” a new book series with the MIT Press, which solicits short monographs on the history of contemporary environmental problems.

Robert Emmett is Director of Academic Programs at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. While working on his PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin Madison, he was a project assistant at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment. Robert has taught on environmental writing, American literary history, environmental justice, and on how different social systems have produced and responded to environmental problems. His research interests include American environmental writing, memory, the protest novel, urban ecology, and environmental history. His recent research has focused on American garden writing and the cultivation of political and ethical engagement with environmental issues. His publications include a recent collection, co-edited with Frank Zelko, on Studying the Environment: Working across Disciplines (RCC Perspectives, 2014).

Dolly Jørgensen is the acting president of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and project coordinator / researcher at Umeå University, Department of Ecology & Environmental Science. She is an environmental historian with wide-ranging research interests, spanning from medieval forestry practices to aquatic ecosystems created by the modern offshore oil industry. She is currently working on a project about the role of history in the reintroduction of mammals in Europe, focusing on the beaver in Sweden and the UK and lynx in UK. She is the founder and web manager for the Medieval Environmental History Network: http://medievaleh.org.

Kati Lindström is an environmental humanities scholar who has worked across a wide range of disciplines. Starting off with undergraduate and graduate studies in literature and semiotics in the University of Tartu, she did her PhD studies in cultural anthropology at Kyoto University, Japan, and, in close collaboration with archaeologists, geographers, folklorists, ecologists and others, worked as a co-leader of a landscape history project on Neolithisation and Modernisation processes and environmental protection at East Asian inland seas. Currently she holds a Post-Doc position at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and is a researcher at the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. Kati Lindström is also a founding and board member of the Estonian Centre for Environmental History. Her research interests range from landscape phenomenology and national landscape imagery to environmental protection and the environmental history of East Asia and Baltic regions.