The Environmental Humanities Month is made possible with your help! We always strive to bring interesting people and ideas together and having a domain would allow us to continue doing this in the future. By donating (even the price of a cup of coffee helps!) you are helping to build this wonderful community and online archive. Please make your donations HERE.
---
ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES MONTH 2022 EVENTS
October 6 (Thursday) 18.00-20.00 (Helsinki), 13.00-15.00 (Shanghai), online
Living in the Wasteocene? Discards and the Culture of Waste in the 21st century (Part 1)
Iris Borowy, Shanghai University, Peter Wynn Kirby, University of Oxford, Viktor Pál
The unprecedented accumulation of a growing variety of waste, including discarded plastics, paper, food, glass or metals, creates problems whose global reach can as yet only be estimated. It forms a key facet of the fact that the form of development embraced by societies around the world during the last decades has been characterized by the disposal of large quantities of materials and products on land, in water or in the air, often after only brief periods of usage. Marco Armiero has coined the expression of “wasteocene,” depicting an era increasingly defined by the massive transformation of natural resources into trash, partly toxic material, which is no longer used by humans or any other living beings on Earth. Professor Borowy and discussants Dr Kirby and Dr Pál will consider the waste issue in the Wasteocene from a historical perspective.
More information available from Center for the History of Global Development, Shanghai University.
---
October 6-13, Chile
Río Tinto Field School, A journey through the red mirror of the Anthropocene
---
October 11 (Tuesday) 15.00-16.30 (Helsinki), hybrid
Planting ideas for vegetal humanities and art research
Annette Arlander, Karoliina Lummaa, and Olga Cielemecka
Place: University of Helsinki, Porthania 224, Yliopistonkatu 3
After the event (16.45-18.00), we will hold a ‘Playful planting’ narrative game to consider the role of playfulness, imagination, and story-telling in the emergent strategies for living together in times of climate emergency and biodiversity loss.
No registration needed for live participation, please register for Zoom link via the link above by 10.10.2022.
---
October 13 (Thursday) 18.15-20.00 (Shanghai), online
Lecture by Nitin Desai, former UN Under Secretary General for Sustainable Development, and organizer of the Rio Earth Summit (1992), the Copenhagen Social Development Summit (1995), the Monterrey Finance and Development Summit (2002) and the Johannesburg Sustainable Development Summit (2002)
"The New Emerging Global Order Prospects for Economic Development and Sustainability"
For Zoom details please contact: historyglobaldevelopment(at)posteo(dot)net
---
October 13 (Thursday) 14.15-15.45 (Finland), live
Nature and Nation. Environmental Engineering in the Carpathian Basin since 1800
Viktor Pál, University of Jyväskylä
Place: University of Jyväskylä, Historica, H404
No registration needed, no streaming.
---
October 13 (Thursday) 15.15-16.30 (Oslo), live
Soils and Fungi: Thinking and Being with Mycelial Relations
Michael J. Hathaway, Simon Fraser University
Place: Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, 12th floor Niels Treschows hus
---
October 16 (Sunday) 13.00-17.00 (Helsinki), live
Project Campfire Catering. Discussions and actions that flow between art and science.
Organizers: Päivi Maunu and Mirimari Väyrynen
Place: Harakka Island, Helsinki
Please register via the link above by 15.10.2022
---
October 17 (Monday), 16.00-17.30 (Oslo), online
Un-earthed: Terraforming Fictions
Un-earthed's first reading group session of the fall semester, on the topic of terraforming.
Please inquire zoom link from the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities via the link above
---
October 18 (Tuesday) 12.00-17.00 (Oslo), live
Workshop and Foray: Dirt Matters
Sensory workshop by natural historian and environmental photographer Alison Pouliot.
Place: Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, Room 120, Harriet Holters hus
---
October 19 (Wednesday) 16.00-18.00 (Oslo), live
Walkshop with natural historian and environmental photographer Alison Pouliot.
Place: Oslo, Sognsvann, by the kiosk
---
October 20 (Thursday) 15.15-17.00 (Oslo), live
Lesley Green, University of Cape Town
Place: Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
---
October 21 (Friday) Time: 15.00-16.00 (Helsinki), 14.00-15.00 (CET), online
Book Launch: Social and Cultural Aspects of the Circular Economy
Contributors: Iris Borowy, Sabine Lettmann, Carlos Miret Fernandéz, Viktor Pál, Luciana Valio
Please register via the link above by 20.10.2022.
---
October 30 (Sunday) 10.00-11.30 (Helsinki), online
Small cogs of a big economy: how agricultural waste bristles and hair raised Soviet industry
Tetiana Perga, State Institution “Institute of World History of National Academy of Science of Ukraine”, Volkswagen Foundation Fellow, Heidelberg University, Germany
Please register via the link above by a day before the event.
---
October 30 (Sunday) 18.00-19.00 (Helsinki), 9.00-10.00 (Idaho), online
Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran
Please register via the link above by a day before the event.
---
October 31 (Monday) 15.30-17.00 (Helsinki) 14.30-16.00 (CET), online
Grounding Value in the Anthropocene: Online roundtable with organizers and authors
Simone Schleper, Maastricht University, Iva Pesa, University of Groningen, Dan Finch-Race, University of Bologna, Nicola Thomas, Lancaster University, Alice Cunningham, Artist, Bristol, Dr. Kasia Mika, Queen Mary University London, Monica Vasile, Maastricht University.
Please register via the link above by a day before the event.
---
November 1 (Tuesday) 16.00-17.00 (Helsinki) 14.00-15.00 (GMT), online
Walking in the Arctic: Personal Narratives
Susana Hancock, University of Oxford; Elena Adasheva, Yale University
Please register via the link above by a day before the event.
---
November 2 (Wednesday) 15.15-17.00 (Oslo), live
Kjetil Fallan, University of Oslo
Place: Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, 12th floor Niels Treschows hus
---
November 3 (Thursday) 13.00-14.30 (Helsinki) 12.00-13.30 (CET), online
Animals and/in Soviet Famines in Ukraine. Where Is an Animal in Famine Studies?
Iryna Skubii, Queen’s University
Please register via the link above by a day before the event.
---
November 3 (Thursday) 16.00-19.00 (Helsinki), online
Learning from Doubt Student Projects
Joonas Pulkkinen and Lauri Lähteenmäki, as well Zagros Manuchar from Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki;
Emma de Carvalho, Sonja Kilpeläinen, Kaisa Penttinen, Anni Piiroinen, Scott Williams and Spyridoula Fotinis from the University of Helsinki
This event is sponsored by IHME Helsinki and is based on the IHME Helsinki 2022 Commission
Please register via the link above by a day before the event.
---
November 9 (Wednesday) 15.00-16.00 (Helsinki) 13.00-14.00 (GMT), hybrid
The Great Cormorant – a Bird Worthy of a Song
Ulla Taipale, Curator / Researcher / Artist
This event is sponsored by IHME Helsinki
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
November 11 (Friday) 16.15-17.45 (CET), live
Reading Readers of Environmental History in Hungary – Roundtable discussions
Organizer: Róbert Balogh, University of Public Service, Hungary
Place: Budapest (Hungary), University of Public Service, Wing Building, John Lukács Hall
---
November 15 (Tuesday), 14.00-15.30 (Helsinki), hybrid
Heta Lähdesmäki, University of Helsinki
Place: University of Helsinki, City Center Campus, Porthania Building, Room P444
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
November 16 (Wednesday) 18.00-19.30 (Helsinki), online
Energy(and)Humanities. Low-Carbon Research Methods Workshop
Kate Elliott, Alexandra Lakind, Inna Häkkinen
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
November 18 (Friday) 10.00-11.30 (Helsinki), live
Green Karelia: National Parks and Ecotourism in the Republic of Karelia from the 1980s to the 2000s
Place: University of Helsinki, City Center Campus, Porthania Building, Room P444
Alexander Osipov, University of Eastern Finland
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
November 18 (Friday) 15.00-16.00 (Helsinki), online
The Human Coffee Room. Video and Seminar
Jes Hooper, Anthrozoologist, the University of Exeter, Meri Linna, Saija Kassinen, Harrie Liveart, Jonathan Salvage, University of Brighton
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
November 22 (Tuesday) 14.00-15.00 (CET), online
Environmental History Journal Roundtable: Nature and the New Right
Venus Bivar, Stephen Brain, Rohan D'Souza, Mark Hersey, Julia Obertreis, Viktor Pál, Lise Sedrez
"The rise of right-wing populism, a global phenomenon with significant momentum in large and small countries alike, poses a serious challenge to the neoliberal order that has dominated global politics since the fall of the Soviet Union. A new emphasis on nationalism in economics and foreign policy, traditionalism in social issues, and anti-elite sentiment in public life has already brought significant changes to domestic and international affairs around the globe, with more shifts almost certain to come. With this in mind, the editors reached out to leading environ- mental historians from France, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, and India and asked them, without a predetermined political agenda, to assess the ramifications of their country’s “New Right” movement for the natural world."
---
November 23 (Wednesday) 11:00-12:00 (CET), online
Mirrors of the Anthropocene
More information and zoom details: lukas.barrero(at)gmail(dot)com
The seminar will present the ongoing project "Mirrors of the Anthropocene" as a situated research methodology for the study of this era. To this end, the experience of the "Rio Tinto Field School" will be presented, in which during October 2022, an interdisciplinary team of researchers, artists and activists traveled on foot, by bicycle and kayak the 102 km of this acidic river from its source next to the historic Riotinto open-pit mines and the toxic waste dump at Nerva, to its mouth in the Atlantic Ocean, where we find chemical industry and its waste and intensive berry plantations just a few meters from the place from where Christopher Columbus set off on his expedition in 1492. Through this experience, these socio-environmental problems were analysed but also felt individually and collectively and alternative futures were imagined with local actors. The Tinto River basin can be understood as a pivot for movements such as colonialism, migration, industrialization, and extractivism in the Anthropocene era and other "-cenes" such as Plantationoce, Wasteocene, etc. We would like to reflect on how to capture and study such historic processes, how they are embodied in landscapes, people and culture and what they mean for the future. Through this seminar we want to open and deepen the methodological debate on the study of "sacrifice zones" as zone 0 of the Anthropocene through a multi-temporal (past, present, and future) and multidisciplinary perspective.
---
November 23 (Wednesday) 15.00-21.00 (Helsinki), 09:00-15:00 (Toronto), online
The Language of Transition: A Podcast Series
Can transition, the now-familiar shorthand for environmental and energy change, fully account for the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, and the tasks ahead? Does transition, as a concept and a project, do justice to the situation we face? Or are we in desperate need of new ways of knowing and new ways of being: new epistemology, new ontology?
Organizers: Mark Simpson, Scott Stoneman, Imre Szeman, and Caleb Wellum
Contributors: Stacey Balkan, Darin Barney, Cara Daggett, Tommy Davis, Emily Eaton, Walter Gordon, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Robert Johnson, Graeme MacDonald, Swaralipi Nandi, Penelope Plaza, Hiroki Shin, Allan Stoekl, Caleb Wellum, Jennifer Wenzel, Sarah Marie Wiebe, Rhys Williams, and Anna Zalik.
---
November 24 (Thursday) 12.30-14.00 (Helsinki), live
Lili di Puppo, University of Helsinki
Place: University of Helsinki, City Center Campus, Porthania Building, Room P444
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
November 24 (Thursday) 14.00-15.30 (Helsinki), live
J. G. Granö’s Perception Of The Environment: Sensory Approaches to Landscapes in Western Mongolia
Victoria Soyan Peemot, PhD Indigenous Studies, University of Helsinki
Place: University of Helsinki, City Center Campus, Porthania Building, Room P444
---
November 25 (Friday) 13.00-15.00 (Helsinki), online
Susan Haris, IIT Delhi, India; Anu Pande, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
November 28 (Monday) 11.00-12.00 (Helsinki) 10.00-11.00 (CET), online
Human motivations and environmental development from a historical perspective
Gábor Koloh, Research Centre for Humanities, Institute of History, Hungary
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
November 29 (Tuesday) 15.00-18.00 (CET), live
Environmental Humanities Workshop with Péter Szabó, Czech Academy of Sciences
Faculty of Humanities, University of Ostrava
---
November 30 (Wednesday) 9.00-18.45 (CET), live
Green Utopia Now! A Transdisciplinary Symposium on How to Deal with the Climate Crisis
Place: Department of Economics and Management Aula Magna - Palazzo Bevilacqua Costabili Via Voltapaletto 11, University of Ferrara (Università Degli Studi Di Ferrara)
Organizers: co-organized by Ilenia Casmiri and Manuel Sousa Oliveira and in partnership with the PhD Programme in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing, University of Ferrara, the Centre for English, Translation, and Anglo-Portuguese Studies - CETAPS, University of Porto, and the Routes towards Sustainability University Network, held jointly with the 4th Annual Symposium of the PhD Programme in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing, and featured in this year's edition of the University of Helsinki Environmental Humanities Hub's Environmental Humanities Month 2022
Summary: Green Utopia Now! brings together an outstanding group of early career researchers (ECRs) working on climate and the environment in various fields of study. The symposium will provide a creative space where ECRs can share their transdisciplinary perspectives on how to challenge the limits of monodisciplinary views on sustainability, and how the sciences and the humanities can join forces to tackle the current climate crisis. Each of these scientific and cultural points of view will be brought together by a utopian impulse that insists on the role of collaboration, and the urgency of positive climate action. In fact, this symposium is guided by our conviction about the importance of (1) transdisciplinary collaboration, (2) innovative research conducted by ECRs, and (3) utopian thinking and practice for engaging with global scale problems
Schedule:
9:00-9:30 OPENING REMARKS, ILENIA CASMIRI, University of Ferrara, MANUEL SOUSA OLIVEIRA, University of Porto
9:30-10:30 Chair: MANUEL SOUSA OLIVEIRA
9:30-10:10
KEYNOTE LECTURE - HEATHER ALBERRO, Nottingham Trent University, UK (online)
Terrestrial Ecotopianism: Multispecies Flourishing in and beyond the Capitalocene
10:10-10:30 Discussion
10:30-11:00 COFFEE BREAK
11:00-13:00 PANEL 1 - Chair: ILENIA CASMIRI
ATHIRA UNNI, Leeds Beckett University, UK, Green Utopianism and the Colonial Anthropocene in South Asian Speculative Fiction
FABIOLA ONOFRIO, University of Ferrara, FRANCESCO NICOLLI, University of Ferrara
Estimation of Willingness to Pay for the Conservation of Ursus Arctos: An Italian Case Study
FRANCISCA TEIXEIRA, University of Porto, Between Science and Utopia: Stakeholders’ Perceptions of the Hydrogen Paradigm
FLORIAN WAGNER, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, “Along the Seam between Worlds”: Planetary Poetics in Kaie Kellough’s Magnetic Equator
13:00-15:00 LUNCH BREAK
15:00-17:00 - PANEL 2
Chair: MANUEL SOUSA OLIVEIRA
FRANCYANE KARLA LOPEZ DUARTE, University of Ferrara, The Transformation of Cemeteries into Sustainable Structures in the Urban Environment
TÂNIA CERQUEIRA, University of Porto, “When we heal our land, we are healed also”: Indigenous Young Adult Dystopias and Interconnectedness
FRANCESCA ANGELA LIOCE, University of Ferrara, Past and Present of a Game Species through Genetics and Economics: The Case of the Alpine Chamois
DENISA KRÁSNÁ, Masaryk University, Czech Republic (online), Imagining Decolonial Futurities: Anarcha Indigenism, Decolonial Animal Ethic, and Indigenous Veganism
17:00-17:30 COFFEE BREAK
17:30-18:30 - Chair: ILENIA CASMIRI
17:30-18:10 KEYNOTE LECTURE
WOJCIECH MAŁECKI, University of Wroclaw, The Promise of Climate Fiction: Utopia, Imagination, and Empowerment
18:10-18:30 Discussion
18:30-18:45 CLOSING REMARKS
---
December 13 (Tuesday) 11.30-13.00 (Tallinn), online
History of Environmentalism in Estonia Roundtable
Ulrike Plath, Elle-Mari Talivee, Viktor Pál
Please register via the link above at least a day before the event.
---
Another male only panel? Women contributors currently are an estimated 59.6 per cent
Environmental Humanities Month is organized by Viktor Pál. Student assistant: Emma de Carvalho. Select activities are generously supported by IHME Helsinki.
---