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.

We meet online three times per semester (in October, November, and December; January, February, and March). New members are welcome – if you’d like to come along, please email: m.j.lear@sms.ed.ac.uk for readings and a zoom link.

Next Meeting (Friday 27th October, 10.30am):

ATTENTION AND THE ENVIRONMENT (SUGGESTED BY ELLIE BUSH & MATTHEW LEAR)
– Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, Ursula Münster, Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness (2016)
– Jonathan L. Clark, Attentional Deviance (2020)

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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