Context and Provocation

The recent emergence of the environmental humanities as a unique field of interdisciplinary scholarship is part of a growing willingness to engage with the environment from within the humanities and social sciences in ways that recognise the entangled relations between human and nonhuman worlds and the way in which contemporary environmental issues are inextricably bound up with questions of meaning, value, ethics, justice and the politics of knowledge production. Scholarship across the environmental humanities is therefore characterised by situated, plural and multi-voiced accounts of meaning, belonging, kinship and relationality, in ways that problematise procedural solutions, and narrowly-framed resolutions to contemporary environmental issues, whilst at the same time seeking to animate new political affiliations and possibilities. Learning to ‘become worldly’ as Donna Haraway suggests, means ‘grappling with, rather than generalising from, the ordinary,’[1] and crafting narratives of, and methods that attend to, the multiplicity and messiness of contemporary environmental relations. This orientation both situates environmental humanities scholarship in the midst of eco-political struggles whilst offering a vantage point for a participatory engagement with overlapping human and non-human worlds. If environmental humanists are engaged in crafting stories that speak of both environmental degradation, and inspire hope, in the ruins of modernist visions of progress[2] they are narratives that “are a part of the world, and so they participate in its becoming. As a result, telling stories has consequences: one of which is that we will inevitably be drawn into new connections, and with them new accountabilities and obligations.”[3] Grounded in this broad interest in narrative and the situated complexity of entangled lives, participatory work in the environmental humanities has both drawn on and reimagined established practices in the “public humanities,” from community histories to collaborations with museums, galleries and broadcasters. This public-facing work has sought to engage with wider publics, often simply as audiences but sometimes also as genuine participants in the production of knowledge, the making of environmental decisions, and the imagination of alternative possibilities.

There are, however, other rich veins of participatory scholarship and practice that are yet to really influence work in the environmental humanities. During roughly the same period that the environmental humanities has been taking form, demands for – and programmes designed to promote – public participation in environmental issues and decision making have become a characteristic feature of contemporary ecological politics. These range from the now-widespread use of citizens juries, deliberative consultation processes and focus groups to device-centred modes of distributed participation[4] and the emergence of experimental political projects,[5] often characterised by a repurposing of the infrastructures of state environmental policy and hacking the tools of technoscientific ecological assessment.[6] At the same time, the proliferation of new avenues for public participation with – and indeed contestation and disruption of – scientific projects and assertions of authority has resulted in the emergence of novel spaces of participatory negotiation and collective formation, that appear as momentary ruptures and openings that unsettle constitutional relations between citizens, science and the state. Participation in this sense, is always ‘in the making’, entangled in the configuration and re-configuration of relations between science, democracy and social order.[7]

The goal of this workshop is therefore to explore the possibilities for a fruitful interchange between these two bodies of contemporary scholarship – exploring the diverse public faces of the environmental humanities: from emerging citizen humanities and citizen sensing projects, to reworkings of public participation and modes of democratic engagement in knowledge production, technology evaluation and broader decision making. Across these wide-ranging themes, we are interested in both the state of current practice and the potential for an interdisciplinary and engaged humanities scholarship to contribute to the generation of creative and just approaches to contemporary environmental challenges. At the same time, the workshop will also aim to explore what happens to the humanities—to research, writing, and more—at this interface. How might we avoid the capture of participation within the metrics of outputs, and instead transform it into a subject of critical and creative reflection and practice?

[1] D. J Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

[2] A Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitaist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015).

[3] T van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

[4] N Marres, Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012).

[5] N. Marres, J Lezaun, and M Tironi, "Experiments in Participation," in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies: Fourth Edition, ed. U Felt, et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), Brice Laurent, "Political experiments that matter: Ordering democracy from experimental sites," Social Studies of Science 46, no. 5 (2016), J Chilvers and M Kearnes, eds., Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016).

[6] Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Nicholas Shapiro, "Attuning to the chemosphere: Domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime," Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 3 (2015).

[7] J Chilvers and M Kearnes, eds., Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016).