As the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities network has developed it’s become apparent that a lot of our network members work on the temporal aspects of environmental crises. Consequently, members of the network have been meeting once a month since December for a ‘Deep Time’ reading group, to discuss all things both environmental and timely. We’ve taken one essay from Ellsworth and Kruse’s collection Making the Geologic Now and paired it with something from a particular member’s research. Interrogating the implications of living in the Anthropocene is our over-arching concern, but our discussion has already branched off into all kinds of absorbing, cognate areas. So far we’ve looked at (amongst other things) vibrant materialism, mountains in literature, Anthropocene poetics, and the ethnography of dogs’ dreaming.
We’ve really enjoyed the interdisciplinary nature of these meetings (we’re composed so far of representatives from philosophy, art history, human geography, animal studies, literature, and design theory), which has led to some fascinating, fantastic conversations. The next meeting will look at treatments of honeybee dance language in philosophy and ethnography.
