The Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network presents researchers within the humanities with a forum in which to engage with each other’s work, to share insights, and develop collaborative partnerships.
 
EEHN

Reading Group

 

Come along

We host a monthly reading group where we discuss new work in the Environmental Humanities. The group is cross-disciplinary (including environmental history, geography, anthropology, political ecology, literary studies, and more), and readings are selected by different members each month. The theme for this year is Environmental Feminisms, with a focus in semester 1 on Hydro-feminism.

We meet three times per semester (in October, November, and December; January, February, and March). Meetings are online apart from the second meeting per semester which happens in-person in conjunction with the CRITIQUE reading group. New members are welcome – if you’d like to come along, please email: e.erdosi@sms.ed.ac.uk for details of the current readings and Zoom details.

The first reading group session will be 2-3pm, Friday 7th October.

The second session will be 2-3pm, Friday 4th November (in person CMB (Chrystal MacMillan Building) Conference Room 3.15)

Our reading so far

November 2022: Global Black Ecologies (with members of the CRITIQUE Group from the School of Social and Political Science; suggested by Rebecca Macklin)

  • Justin Hosbey, Hilda Lloréns, and JT Roane, ‘Global Black Ecologies’
  • Brittany Meché, ‘Black as Drought’

October 2022: Feminist Decolonial Methodologies (suggested by Eszter Erdosi)

  • Jamiey Hamilton Faris, ‘Ocean Weaves: Reconfigurations of Climate Justice in Oceania’ (2022)

March 2022: Submerged Perspectives & Decolonial River Ecologies (suggested by Fred Carter)

  • Macarena Gómez-Barris, ‘Submerged Perspectives: The Arts of Land &Water Defense,’ (2021)
  • Lisa Blackmore’s ‘Turbulent River Times: Art & Hydropower in Latin America’s Extractive Zones’ (2020)
  • Francisco Huichaqueo ‘Mencer Ñi Pewma‘ (2011)
February 2022: Blackness & Landscape (suggested by Alycia Pirmohamed)
  • Jason Allen-Paisant ‘Reclaiming Time: On Blackness and Time’ (2021)
  • Jason Allen-Paisant, ‘Two Poems,’ Granta, (2020).
November 2021: Multispecies Studies & Critical Race Theory (suggested by Peter Adkins)
  • Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, (2018)
  • Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)

October 2021: Pollution as Colonialism & Indigenous Resurgence (suggested by Rebecca Macklin)

September 2021: Decolonial Agropoetics & Metabolic Rift (suggested by Fred Carter)
June/July 2021: Settler Ecologies & Vernacular Resistance (suggested by Fred Carter)
April/May 2021: Environmental Justice, Tactics, & Sabotage (suggested by Fred Carter & Dr Alexandra Campbell)
March 2021: Social Reproduction in the Racial Capitalocene (suggested by Fred Carter & Dr Alexandra Campbell)
February 2021: Embodied Knowledge & Deep Time (suggested by Robert Woodford and Dr David Farrier)
January 2021: Sonic ecologies / solidarities (suggested by Dr Rebecca Collins)
December 2020: Riots & Ecology (suggested by Alexandra Campbell & Fred Carter)
October 2020: Black Ecologies (suggested by Fred Carter)
February – September 2020 (Industrial action & Covid-19)
November 2019 (suggested by David Farrier)
October 2019 (suggested by Alex Campbell)
  • Haraway, Donna. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” Feminist studies 14.3 (1988): 575-599.
  • Video “Recycling is like a band-aid on gangrene” by Taylor Hess and Noah Hutton
July – September 2019 (Summer Break)
June 2019 (suggested by Michelle Bastian)
  • Vanessa Watts. “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Re-Visiones 0 (7).
  • Anthropocene HWW Event talks from Sherry Copenace and Audra Mitchell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlhY7Vez1NA
May 2019 (suggested by Michelle Bastian and Alex Campbell)
  • Deborah Bird Rose. (2003) “Decolonizing the Discourse of Environmental Knowledge in Settler Societies.”
  • Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2008) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples Zed Books, London.
April 2019
  • Kyle P. Whyte. (2018) “Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1–2) 224–242
  • Heather Davis & Zoe Todd (2017) “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(4): 761-780.
March 2019 (suggested by Alex Campbell)
  • Françoise Vergès (2017) “Racial Capitalocene” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Verso, London pp72-82
  • Christine Sharpe (2016) “Chapter One: The Wake” In the wake: On Blackness and being , Durham: Duke University Press.
February 2019 (suggested by Michelle Bastian)
  • Greta Gaard (2016) “Where is Feminism in the Environmental Humanities?” in The Environmental Humanities, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Rowman & Littlefield)
  • Jennifer Hamilton & Astrida Neimanis (2018) “Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities” Environmental Humanities, 10.2:501-527
December 2018 (suggested by David Farrier)
  • Selections from Fisher, Mark. The weird and the eerie. Watkins Media Limited, 2017.
  • Gillings, Michael R., and Ian T. Paulsen. “Microbiology of the Anthropocene.” Anthropocene 5 (2014): 1-8.
  • McFall-Ngai, Margaret. “Noticing microbial worlds: The postmodern synthesis in biology.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet| Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017)
November 2018 (suggested by Vivek Santayana)
  • Selections from Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
  • Hornborg, Alf. “Dithering while the planet burns: Anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene.” Reviews in anthropology 46.2-3 (2017): 61-77.
March 2018 – October 2018 (Reading Group hiatus)
February 2018 (suggested by Dominic Hinde)
  • Hartnell, Anna. “Writing the liquid city: excavating urban ecologies after Katrina.” Textual Practice 31.5 (2017): 933-949.
  • Bryant, Antony. “Liquid modernity, complexity and turbulence.” Theory, Culture & Society 24.1 (2007): 127-135.
  • Folke, Carl. “Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses.” Global environmental change 16.3 (2006): 253-267.
December 2017 (suggested by Fred Carter)
  •  Porcher, Jocelyne. “The work of animals: a challenge for social sciences.” Humanimalia: a journal of human-animal interface studies 6.1 (2014): 1-9.
  • Despret, Vinciane. “The becomings of subjectivity in animal worlds.” Subjectivity 23.1 (2008): 123-139.
  • Engels, Friedrich. The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man. Foreign Languages Press, 1975.
October 2017
  • Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Posthuman Environs.” Environmental humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (2016): 25-44.
  • Langford, Jean M. “Avian bedlam: toward a biosemiosis of troubled parrots.” Environmental Humanities 9.1 (2017): 84-107.
August – September 2017 (Summer Break)
July 2017
  • Helmreich, Stefan. “Nature/culture/seawater.” American Anthropologist 113.1 (2011): 132-144.
  • Neimanis, Astrida. “Hydrofeminism: Or, on becoming a body of water.” Undutiful daughters: New directions in feminist thought and practice (2012): 85-99
June 2017 (suggested by Michelle Bastian)
  • Helen M. Rozwadowski, Ocean’s Depths, Environmental History, Volume 15, Issue 3, July 2010, Pages 520–525
  • Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene”. Comparative Literature 1 March 2017; 69 (1): 32–44
June 2016 – May 2017 (Reading Group hiatus)
May 2016 (suggested by Claudia Rosenhan)
  • Mark Halsey, (2006) Deleuze and Environmental Damage  (Ashgate), Chaps 3 & 4
  • China Mieville, (2011) Covehithe
April 2016 (suggested by Christos Galanis)
  • Jon T. Coleman, (2006) Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (Yale), Introduction & chapter 1
 March 2016 (suggested by David Farrier)
  • Anna Tsing, (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton), chapters 1-3
  • Michael Marder, (2016) The Chernobyl Herbarium (Open Humanities Press)
 February 2016 (suggested by Andrew Patrizio and Erin Despart):
  • Emily Apter, (2013) ‘Planetary Dysphoria’, Third Text 27.1
  • Nicholas Mirzoef, (2014), ‘Visualising the Anthropocene’, Public Culture 26.2
December 2015 (suggested by Franklin Ginn):
  • R. Gifford (2012). “Viral evolution in deep time: lentiviruses and mammals”. Trends in Genetics, 28:2.
  • R. Wallace et al. (2015) “Did Neoliberalizing West African Forests Produce a New Niche for Ebola?” International Journal of Health Services.
  • J. Zylinksa (2014). “Chapter 7: Ethics”, in A Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press): 91-102
November 2015 (suggested by Michelle Bastian):
  • Jane Bennett (2001), The Enchantment of Modern Life. Chapter 1.
  • Rochelle L. Johnson, ‘“This Enchantment Is No Delusion”: Henry David Thoreau, the New Materialisms, and Ineffable Materiality’, ISLE 21.3 (2014): 607-635.
October 2015 (suggested by Michelle Bastian and David Farrier)
  • Debroah Bird Rose, Thom Van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Stuart Cooke, Matthew Kearnes, and Emily O’Gorman, “Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities”, Environmental Humanities 1.1 (2012): 1-5.
  • Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Asberg, and Johan Hedren, “Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities:Toward Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene”, Ethics and the Environment 20.1 (Spring 2015): 67-97.
July – September 2015 (Summer Break)
June 2015 (suggested by Audra Mitchell)
  • Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (1968)
  • Quentin Meillassoux (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of
    Contingency. Preface and Chapter 1.
May 2015 (suggested by David Farrier)
  • Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519.7542 (2015): 171-180.
  • Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geologic subjects: nonhuman origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman.” cultural geographies July 2015 vol. 22no. 3 383-407
  • Jonathan Franzen (2015) ‘Carbon Capture’ The New Yorker
March 2015 (suggested by Michelle Bastian)
  • Nelson, R. A., et al. (2001). “The leap second: its history and possible future.” Metrologia 38(6): 509-529.
  • Birth, K. K. (2011). “The Regular Sound of the Cock: Context-Dependent Time Reckoning in the Middle Ages.” KronoScope 11(1-2): 125-144.
  • We also workshopped Michelle’s paper ‘Liberating Clocks: Rethinking the transformative potential of ‘clock time’
February 2015 (suggested by Audra Mitchell)
  • Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA. , Harvard University Press. Introduction
    film, Nostalgia for the Light
January 2015 (suggested by Michelle Bastian)
  • Gunaratnam, Y. and N. Clark (2012). “Pre-Race Post-Race: Climate Change and Planetary Humanism.” Dark Matter 9(1): Post-Racial Imaginaries.
  • Oliver Kellhammer ‘Neo-Eocene’ In Making the Geologic Now
  • Clark, N. (2008). “Aboriginal Cosmopolitanism.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 737-744.
  • Lloyd, G. (2014) Wild Australia: can the world’s oldest plant be saved? The Australian
December 2014 (suggested by Matthew Bampton)
  • Lenski, Richard E. “Evolution in action: a 50,000-generation salute to Charles Darwin.” Microbe 6.616 (2011): 30-33.
  • Primo Levi. 1984. The Periodic Table. Schocken Books (Italian 1975: Il Sistema Periodico Einaudi): Carbon
  • Waters, Colin N., et al. “A stratigraphical basis for the Anthropocene?.” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395.1 (2014): 1-21.
November 2014 (suggested by David Farrier)
  • Nadine Gordimer ‘Loot’ (2003)
  • Margaret Atwood ‘Stone Mattresses’ The New Yorker Fiction December 19, 2011 Vol. 87 Issue 41
  • JG Ballard ‘The Day of Forever’
  • JG Ballard ‘The Voices of Time’
October 2014 (suggested by Angela McClanahan)
  • Irvine, R. (2014). “Deep time: an anthropological problem.” Social Anthropology 22(2): 157-172.
  • Shannon Lee, D. (2010). “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 51(6): 761-793.
  • Edgeworth, M. “Scale.” The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2013).
July – September 2014 (Summer Break)
June 2014 (suggested by Franklin Ginn)
  • “Synchronous World” by Peter Sloterdijk (chapter 28 of ‘In the world interior of capital’)
  • Malm, A. and A. Hornborg (2014). “The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1(1): 62-69.
  • “On some of the affects of capitalism” a recent lecture by Bruno Latour on the Anthropocene and capitalism
  • Oliver Goodhall and David Benqué “Ultra diamond / Super value” In Making the Geologic Now
May 2014 (suggested by Jeremy Kidwell)
  • Etienne Turpin and Valeria Federigh ‘A New Element, A New Force, A New Input: Antonio Stoppani’s Anthropozoic’ In Making the Geologic Now
  • Steven Collins(1992) “Nirvāṇa, Time, and Narrative” History of Religions 31, no. 3
  • Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity” from In The Self? Edited by Galen Strawson. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005.
April 2014 (suggested by Andrew Patrizio)
  • William E. Connolly ‘Melancholia and Us’ The Contemporary Condition
  • Jane Bennett ‘Earthling, Now and Forever?’ In Making the Geologic Now
  • Ilana Halperin ‘Autobiographical Trace Fossils’ In Making the Geologic Now
March 2014 (suggested by Francoise Wemelsfelder)
  • Moore, L. J. and M. Kosut (2014). “Among the colony: Ethnographic fieldwork, urban bees and intraspecies mindfulness.” Ethnography 15(4): 516-539.
  • Crist, E. (2004). “Can an Insect Speak?: The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language.” Social Studies of Science 34(1): 7-43.
  • Leadbeater, E. and L. Chittka (2007). “Social Learning in Insects — From Miniature Brains to Consensus Building.” Current Biology 17(16): R703-R713.
February 2014 (suggested by Michelle Bastian)
  • Kohn, E. (2007). “How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement.” American Ethnologist 34(1): 3-24.
  • Bill Gilbert ‘Modeling Collaborative Practices in the Anthropocene’ In Making the Geologic Now
January 2014 (suggested by David Farrier)
  • extract from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain
  • Don McKay ‘Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time’ In Making the Geologic Now
December 2013
  • Ellsworth, E. and J. Kruse, Eds. (2012). Making the geologic now: Responses to material conditions of contemporary life. Brooklyn, NY, Punctum. Introduction
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