Public *Environmental* Humanities 

This seminar invites proposals on public scholarship and engagement originating from – or related to – the environmental humanities. The desire to be in dialogue with varied publics has long been present in the field and of late has been termed “public humanities.” In recent years, there has been a plethora of research projects that foster communities that extend beyond academia, including via experimental pedagogies, exhibitions, and collaborations with organizations, artists, and museums. Examples of such work include Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou’s digital project Feral Atlas. In addition, the public (including journalistic) writing of scholars like Elizabeth Kolbert, Lauret Edith Savoy, and Rob Nixon, to name a few, has traversed the traditional boundaries of academia in significant ways. The forms of such projects, and the aspirations and implications that attend them, are highly varied. To draw from Emily O’Gorman and co-authors (2019) on the environmental humanities, there are many ways to understand “the public character of the field and its engagement with the wider more-than-human world.”

We invite presentations from scholars about public humanities projects in which they are involved or with which they would like to be involved, including pedagogy, creative projects, collaboration with community organizations, film/media, and more. Participants could also reflect on differing conceptions of the public within the environmental humanities, including from within multispecies ethnography, Indigenous studies, and environmental justice. 

Lastly, we are also interested in presentations that study the impacts of environmental arts and humanities (for example, Matthew Schenider-Mayerson’s work on the influence of climate fiction). We welcome critiques of the limitations of academia as it relates to public humanities or applied humanities –  we are less interested in case studies and more curious to think together about what it means to “do” public humanities, what the reciprocal relationship looks like (between academia and “the public”), and what the limits and possibilities are of public humanities from an environmental humanities standpoint. We are, in short, looking forward to conversations and ideas about possible futures shaped by our collective experiences engaging in public humanities. 

Possible topics include:

Public environmental humanities

Conceptions of the public

Activism and politics

Grants and funding

More-than-human communities

Collaboration

Field research projects

Cultural imperialism

Pedagogy

Creative research 

Digital projects

Public-facing programming

New modes of research and writing 

Non-traditional and open-access publishing