On Common Ground: Synthesizing Equitable Environmental Humanities for Climate Change Action

Project leaders Cecilia Åsberg and Lauren LaFauci on common ground at the Rachel Carson Centre in Munich.

This project brings together the insights of feminist environmental humanities with the actions of important environmental stakeholders. In doing so we also place academic and public discourses on common ground. We propose first to map and synthesize the current state of the field of environmental humanities (EH), and second, to communicate these humanities insights to climate change stakeholders.

In the academic part of the project, we identify EH’s current capacities to embrace its feminist context, and to illuminate its gaps in academic articles with suggestions for bridging knowledge and enabling alternative imaginaries for the future. In the public part of the project, we transform this synthesized knowledge into a handbook of key concepts for climate change actors, such as politicians, policy makers, teachers, curators, and others. Finally, with awareness that Wikipedia is often the public’s first stop for brief but important information, we add and revise entries for EH concepts and underrepresented environmental actors, such as women and people of color. In these ways, our project’s two parts—academic and public— also enact synthesis in synergistic ways: first, by summing up and reorganizing existing knowledge; and second, by uniting foundational feminist EH methods (such as academic activism and citizen humanities) with the practical dissemination of our research production. We believe that a feminist- and social justice-oriented approach that incorporates understandings of structural and local inequalities, injustices, and vulnerabilities is best equipped to synthesize and speak to climate change stakeholders, and best synthesizes the ethical imperatives of environmental humanities in academia.

Funding agency: FORMAS, and Rachel Carson Centre
Project leaders: Cecilia Åsberg and Lauren LaFauci
Duration: 2018-2019

A More-than-Human Humanities Research Group