We find ourselves in a time of profound environmental transformation and human dominance of most aspects of planetary life. This innovative course takes as a point of departure the notion that in order to effectively understand, diagnose and repair our planet, we need to look beyond our own disciplinary epistemic boundaries. The core of this course is a series of nine lectures from international scholars across a range of academic disciplines carrying out research across a diverse number of contemporary environmental issues. Each lecture is followed by engaged discussions and exercises to get students thinking across disciplines and bringing into their thought process ideas from across the environmental humanities. The course offers 5 ECTS.
The contemporary challenges arising from global environmental change, such as climate change, land degradation, loss of bio-diversity, freshwater scarcity, toxic contamination and energy scarcity are an important task for scholars from not only the natural and social but also the human sciences. As a result of rising concerns about global environmental change, over the last decade a new scientific field of research has emerged, the Environmental Humanities (EH). Whereas the state of scholarship on issues of environmental change was formerly dominated by the natural and economic sciences and technological and problem-solving approaches, this relatively new and rapidly growing field is constituted by the work of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, including history, literature, cultural studies, anthropology, politics, architecture, and linguistics. These scholars are investigating how the human and human agency are to be understood in the age of the Anthropocene – the era in which humans have become a geological force (Croetzen and Stoermer, 2000); interrogate fundamental concepts such as ‘nature’ and the ‘human’; explore humans’ relation to and transformations of their natural and built environments, particularly as these are mediated by culture, values, and the unintended consequences of human activity; and question our ability to self-destruct as well as our motivation to construct sustainable futures.
This course seeks to put human beings at the center of key debates about environmental crisis, climate change, overconsumption, biodiversity loss and sustainability. Since the 1960s, interest in environmental issues has steadily increased within several humanities disciplines, giving us strong research programs in environmental history, environmental philosophy, environmental ethics, environmental anthropology and archeology, environmental rhetoric, ecocriticism and green cultural studies, among other fields. Similarly, while traditional understandings of "nature" and "the environment" have favored quantitative, technological and problem-solving approaches from the natural sciences, there is now a growing awareness that today' s environmental crisis calls for an interdisciplinary approach, and that environmental issues are inescapably intertwined with human beliefs, cultures, traditions, values, narratives and modes of being in the world. The arts and humanities specialize in articulating, questioning and critiquing human values, as well as imagining new possibilities, and once we understand the environmental crisis as also a cultural crisis, these activities come to seem more important than ever. This course aims to provide students with the more recent methodological and theoretical tools of the environmental humanities, while encouraging interdisciplinary thinking among students of anthropology and related topics. Envisioning the field as a post (or anti)-disciplinary arena, the course will foster students to think across disciplinary borders in order to tackle the environmental and social challenges of current times. It will show how both humanities and social science perspectives are urgently needed to help interpret and give meaning to the rapidly changing world around us.
This course offers students a concise overview of how environmental humanities thinking can help anthropologists, presenting theories, issues, current research, concrete examples and case studies from this exciting field. By integrating knowledge produced in both the sciences and the humanities, we will analyze our conceptions of nature, wilderness, the animal, and ecology; and how these concepts in turn shape our political, economic, and cultural values, including Western societies’ extractive logics. In the first half of each class, a guest lecturer will present their research to the class. In second half, the humanities' contribution to environmental understanding will be fleshed out in a series of discussions, exercises and other activities.
The contemporary challenges arising from global environmental change, such as climate change, land degradation, loss of bio-diversity, freshwater scarcity, toxic contamination and energy scarcity are an important task for scholars from not only the natural and social but also the human sciences. As a result of rising concerns about global environmental change, over the last decade a new scientific field of research has emerged, the Environmental Humanities (EH). Whereas the state of scholarship on issues of environmental change was formerly dominated by the natural and economic sciences and technological and problem-solving approaches, this relatively new and rapidly growing field is constituted by the work of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, including history, literature, cultural studies, anthropology, politics, architecture, and linguistics. These scholars are investigating how the human and human agency are to be understood in the age of the Anthropocene – the era in which humans have become a geological force (Croetzen and Stoermer, 2000); interrogate fundamental concepts such as ‘nature’ and the ‘human’; explore humans’ relation to and transformations of their natural and built environments, particularly as these are mediated by culture, values, and the unintended consequences of human activity; and question our ability to self-destruct as well as our motivation to construct sustainable futures.
This course seeks to put human beings at the center of key debates about environmental crisis, climate change, overconsumption, biodiversity loss and sustainability. Since the 1960s, interest in environmental issues has steadily increased within several humanities disciplines, giving us strong research programs in environmental history, environmental philosophy, environmental ethics, environmental anthropology and archeology, environmental rhetoric, ecocriticism and green cultural studies, among other fields. Similarly, while traditional understandings of "nature" and "the environment" have favored quantitative, technological and problem-solving approaches from the natural sciences, there is now a growing awareness that today' s environmental crisis calls for an interdisciplinary approach, and that environmental issues are inescapably intertwined with human beliefs, cultures, traditions, values, narratives and modes of being in the world. The arts and humanities specialize in articulating, questioning and critiquing human values, as well as imagining new possibilities, and once we understand the environmental crisis as also a cultural crisis, these activities come to seem more important than ever. This course aims to provide students with the more recent methodological and theoretical tools of the environmental humanities, while encouraging interdisciplinary thinking among students of anthropology and related topics. Envisioning the field as a post (or anti)-disciplinary arena, the course will foster students to think across disciplinary borders in order to tackle the environmental and social challenges of current times. It will show how both humanities and social science perspectives are urgently needed to help interpret and give meaning to the rapidly changing world around us.
This course offers students a concise overview of how environmental humanities thinking can help anthropologists, presenting theories, issues, current research, concrete examples and case studies from this exciting field. By integrating knowledge produced in both the sciences and the humanities, we will analyze our conceptions of nature, wilderness, the animal, and ecology; and how these concepts in turn shape our political, economic, and cultural values, including Western societies’ extractive logics. In the first half of each class, a guest lecturer will present their research to the class. In second half, the humanities' contribution to environmental understanding will be fleshed out in a series of discussions, exercises and other activities.
- Opettaja: Roger Norum