EHUM 6105 / Writing

Dr. Darci Deangelo, Annie Clark Tanner Fellow and Anthropology, University of Oklahoma

Pests, Pets, and Parasites

This interdisciplinary course will follow those nonhuman animals that humans want to forget: rodents, roaches, ticks, worms, and fleas. Its course materials will draw from film, history, biology, art, and anthropology to show human-pest relations and how they change across space and time. While humans think of companion animals as the canines by our sides, they forget our humanity affords other coevolutionary friends like rats who became viral vectors when modes of production changed and colonialism emerged. Such an investigation will show how interrelated human-nonhuman worlds are and will provide insight into being human itself. The course will provide the students an opportunity to produce nonfiction writing about these animals. Required fieldtrips will be incorporated into each of the four units and required peer review workshops will complete each unit.

EHUM 6804 / Tertulia

Dr. Danielle Endres, Communication

Tertulia is an opportunity to engage in discussion about a variety of current events and topics in the environmental humanities and in our community. Tertulia provides a space for professional development, building community among EH students, and engaging with the University and Salt Lake communities. Our class will include participating in events on/off campus, discussion sessions, field trips, and guest presenters. Students will also complete assignments in support of professional development. 

EHUM 6850 / Issues in Environmental Humanities

Dr. Chris Low, History and 2023-5 Environmental Humanities Research Professor

Read about Dr. Low's course on our blog.

EHUM 6860 / Practices in Community-Engaged Learning

Place, Race and the Environment

Dr. Jeff Rose, Parks, Rec & Tourism

In this interdisciplinary, community-engaged seminar, we will consider the ways in which various constructions of place are informed by dominant narratives of whiteness, maleness, settler colonialism, capitalism, heterosexism, extractivism, and dominionism, among others. Simultaneously, we will center and consider narratives that have often been underrepresented in academia, favoring place-based scholarship, engagements, activism, and artistry from both the Global South and from various marginalized populations within the Global North. In addition to having many of the features of traditional seminar course, this semester will invite students to experience a collaborative community-engaged project outside of the traditional academic setting, where community engagement is a method, a pedagogy, and an experience, among others.

EHUM 6900 /Special Topics - Field Study

Dr. Melissa Parks, Communication and Environmental Humanities

EHUM 6101 / Foundations in Environmental Humanities

Dr. Brett Clark, Sociology, Environmental & Sustainability Studies, Environmental Humanities

Foundations is designed to introduce students to the broad foundations of environmental thought; it is a survey of cultural, ethical, historical, social, communication, and literary perspectives representing environmental humanities inquiry. Emphasis is placed on theoretical and research traditions. We will study an array of themes, issues, questions, and debates within the humanities and sciences. We will explore how human societies affect the environment, and how human societies are shaped by the environment, as well as how we come to recognize and understand changing environmental conditions. We will address issues associated with knowledge, meaning, justice, crisis, and sustainability.

At the end of the class the student will be able: 1) to evaluate major debates and perspectives within environmental thought; 2) to explicate concepts and ideas associated with the major paradigms; 3) to detail the historical development of environmental thought; 4) to apply different theories to the social and natural world; 5) to develop an informed perspective and approach to evaluate contemporary environmental problems, issues associated with justice/equality, and society/nature relationships; and (6) to propose paths of transformation and alternative futures. 

EHUM 6102 / Research Methods in Environmental Humanities

Dr. Elizabeth Callaway, English

Field Methods is the second foundational course for the Environmental Humanities Program; it is designed to introduce the research methods available to scholars of the environmental humanities. As an inherently interdisciplinary field, environmental humanities has no predetermined or required research methods. Indeed, environmental humanities scholars employ a variety of analytical approaches that are determined by the scale, scope, and content of their research questions. By examining a set of exemplary texts – or “touchstones” – that draw on one or more of these approaches, we will aim for a better understanding of how and in what ways different research methods can enhance the pursuit of environmentally-oriented projects. Unlike traditional methods classes, you will not emerge with expertise in a particular methodology. Rather, as our reading and discussion schedule indicates, you will receive an introductory base of knowledge about different methods (e.g., ecocriticism, ethnography, visual studies, creative non-fiction), and our expectation is that you will use this knowledge to develop and articulate your own methodological focus.

EHUM 6804 / Tertulia

Dr. Danielle Endres, Communication

Tertulia is an opportunity to engage in discussion about a variety of current events and topics in the environmental humanities and in our community. Tertulia provides a space for professional development, building community among EH students, and engaging with the University and Salt Lake communities. Our class will include participating in events on/off campus, discussion sessions, field trips, and guest presenters. Students will also complete assignments in support of professional development. 

EHUM 6850 / Issues in Environmental Humanities

Indigenous Environmental Communication

Dr. Danielle Endres, Communication

This course examines theories, methods, and forms of Indigenous communication in Indigenous Nations and communities located in North America, the Pacific, Hawai’i, Australia, Aotearoa, and elsewhere. It draws from theories and practices of communication that relate to, for example, Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, anti-colonialism, and survivance. The course highlights Indigenous voices, perspectives, theories, research, and methods as related to historical and contemporary issues of digital technology, politics, activism, visual/textual production and representation, cultural preservation, and protection of land.

This course examines Indigenous Communication with a specific focus on Indigenous Environmental Communication. In the study of Indigenous rhetorics, the course is focused on highlighting Indigenous voices and offering students a diverse range of Indigenous
perspectives on historical and contemporary environmental issues; it provides a counter story to the dominant colonizers’ story. While centering Indigenous perspectives, the study of Indigenous rhetorics inevitably includes: discussion of how these movements relate to U.S. society as a whole, analyzing the social structures that Indigenous environmental protectors are challenging, and discussion of the dynamics of racism, colonialism, stereotyping, discrimination, assimilation, and several other topics. The course covers historical and contemporary instances of Indigenous environmental and environmental justice movements, highlighting what Gerald Vizenor has called the “survivance” of Indigenous people.

EHUM 6900 - Special Topics/Field Study

Dr. Melissa Parks, Commuication and Environmental Humanities

EHUM 6105 / EH Writing Seminar

The Memoir of Extraction

Taylor Brorby, Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities

This course is practice. Over time practice becomes habit, and habit becomes a state of being. By learning to write about the world, you will be involved in the world. I don’t mean only to expose you to various texts I find thought-provoking, but to implicate you in the idea of “extraction” in some of it its manifold forms and help you discover your place in it.

Over the semester you’ll be exposed to a variety of writers in a variety of modes. Maybe then you’ll take time later in life to explore those authors that most resonate with you. This course is an attempt to reach far and wide in form to help you see how we (might) write about extraction.

This class is predicated on the belief that good writers read and write often. We will read wide-ranging texts and examine them for their elements of literary craft. This class assumes you are serious writers; therefore, you will read and write much throughout the semester.

Learning Outcomes

If you apply yourself, in this course you will learn…

• The finer points of nonfiction writing.
• What we (might not) mean when we say “extraction.”
• Develop a serious body of work over the semester (35-40 pages of writing).
• Develop a wide vocabulary to critique literary work.
• Understand that reading much is the bread and butter a writer’s life.

EHUM 6850/ Issues in Environmental Humanities

Ecocriticism

Dr. Katharina Gerstenberger, World Languages & Cultures

This seminar offers an introduction to the growing field of ecocriticism. Going back to the 1970s, ecocriticism is typically defined as the literary engagement with questions of the environment. While classic texts include Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and, importantly, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), ecocriticism as an academic discipline begins to gain prominence in the 1990s with Cheryll Glotfelty’s Ecocriticism Reader (1996). Drawing on Feminist but also Marxist theory, the field has since grown to include historical perspectives, economic considerations, anthropological inquiries, queer ecologies, and philosophy. Of central concern to many thinkers is the relationship between humans and nature, with some scholars calling for the abandonment of the dichotomy altogether. More recently, the growing popularity of the Anthropocene, a term that comes from geology and refers to the human impact on the fossil record, has triggered considerable discussion and controversy about the relationship between humans and the environment. In this class, we will familiarize ourselves with the field of ecocriticism as a response to environmental crisis. In addition to a range of theoretical texts, we will also read a selection of literary texts that address environmental issues.

EHUM 6860 / Practices in Community-Engaged Learning

Place, Race and the Environment

Dr. Jeff Rose, Parks, Rec & Tourism

In this interdisciplinary, community-engaged seminar, we will consider the ways in which various constructions of place are informed by dominant narratives of whiteness, maleness, settler colonialism, capitalism, heterosexism, extractivism, and dominionism, among others. Simultaneously, we will center and consider narratives that have often been underrepresented in academia, favoring place-based scholarship, engagements, activism, and artistry from both the Global South and from various marginalized populations within the Global North. In particular, the course will address both fundamental and cutting-edge theoretical debates and empirical contexts, examining weekly critical issues like land back movements, abolition ecologies, awawanenitakik, ecojustice education, biopolitics and necropolitics, degrowth, Anthropocene urbanism, right to the city movements, and critical participatory mapping.

 

EHUM 6101 / Foundations in Environmental Humanities

Dr. Brett Clark, Sociology, Environmental & Sustainability Studies, Environmental Humanities

Foundations is designed to introduce students to the broad foundations of environmental thought; it is a survey of cultural, ethical, historical, social, communication, and literary perspectives representing environmental humanities inquiry. Emphasis is placed on theoretical and research traditions. We will study an array of themes, issues, questions, and debates within the humanities and sciences. We will explore how human societies affect the environment, and how human societies are shaped by the environment, as well as how we come to recognize and understand changing environmental conditions. We will address issues associated with knowledge, meaning, justice, crisis, and sustainability.

At the end of the class the student will be able: 1) to evaluate major debates and perspectives within environmental thought; 2) to explicate concepts and ideas associated with the major paradigms; 3) to detail the historical development of environmental thought; 4) to apply different theories to the social and natural world; 5) to develop an informed perspective and approach to evaluate contemporary environmental problems, issues associated with justice/equality, and society/nature relationships; and (6) to propose paths of transformation and alternative futures. 

EHUM 6102 / Research Methods in Environmental Humanities

Dr. Angela Robinson, Gender Studies, Environmental Humanities

Field Methods is the second foundational course for the Environmental Humanities Program; it is designed to introduce the research methods available to scholars of the environmental humanities. As an inherently interdisciplinary field, environmental humanities has no predetermined or required research methods. Indeed, environmental humanities scholars employ a variety of analytical approaches that are determined by the scale, scope, and content of their research questions. By examining a set of exemplary texts – or “touchstones” – that draw on one or more of these approaches, we will aim for a better understanding of how and in what ways different research methods can enhance the pursuit of environmentally-oriented projects. Unlike traditional methods classes, you will not emerge with expertise in a particular methodology. Rather, as our reading and discussion schedule indicates, you will receive an introductory base of knowledge about different methods (e.g., ecocriticism, ethnography, visual studies, creative non-fiction), and our expectation is that you will use this knowledge to develop and articulate your own methodological focus.

EHUM 6850 / Issues in Environmental Humanities

Affect Theory & Ecological Crisis

Dr. Chris Ingraham, Communication

The study of environmental communication is often undertaken as a project of addressing the ways that human communication about “the environment” figures humans in a certain relation to “it.” While this work is indispensable for, say, creating greater awareness about the climate crisis, or for making climate activism more effective, the tacit premise of environmental communication as a field remains generally anthropocentric. It emphasizes humans as privileged actors and communicators, and the environment as something separate without the same communicative power. In this course, by contrast, we will explore ways of thinking-feeling communication as a generalized, affective phenomenon: not just how people communicate about environments, but also how environments themselves communicate—with profound implications for the ways we relate to one another and our more-than-human kin.

Readings will draw from affect theory, materialist media studies, the science of plant communication, and a range of other anthro-decentric texts (and genres) to feel through the communicative complexities of earthly coexistence during our time of ecological crisis. Students can expect to lead discussions in class and produce a term paper by the semester’s end. We will get outdoors. We will be raw and honest. Our questions will exceed our answers.

 

EHUM 6105 / Writing Seminar

Queer Ecologies: Writing the Animal

Eric J. Robertson, Honors College

What is the role of writing during times of ecological and social upheaval? What do we do with that most unique quality of human life that epitomizes civil thought and social engagement?
“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said that. Socrates thought the written word would usher in an intellectual dark age. He predicted that forgetfulness would take over human culture. It’s true that so many human features are absent when we read and write. The author’s facial expression and voice inflections when she reads, her gestures, a smile from an engaged audience member, face to face dialogues, furrowed brows and dilated pupils. That bit of extra body heat during questioning, then the calming neurochemistry that comes with clarifications and understanding. What could it mean to reintegrate our neglected senses into the writing process?
All writings are different forms of pure imagination. It’s there, but it’s not there. At times, it feels like a miracle, but then, when it’s created in digital vacuums separated from human presences and forced into service for darker purposes, it becomes manipulative and unforgiving. What’s to be done? Can we find a way where writing becomes an embodied act? As essential for life as eating or breathing. Can writing be an act of the body as much as the mind? We’ll try and figure this out together this semester.
We’ll examine genres, of course. But, as our scheme has a queer bent to it, we’ll open the door to question how established genres might be reimagined. What might new literary and artistic forms accomplish to address human life as a good portion of it unravels, fragments and comes untethered from ‘normal’ ecological and sociological baselines?

EHUM 6850 / Issues in Environmental Humanities

The Histories of the Natural World in the Colonial Americas

Dr. Thomas Michael Swenson, Ethnic Studies

What were the main environmental transformations fostered by the colonialism of the Americas? Which ideas and practices on nature emerged amid the centuries-long experience? These are two central questions of the seminar.

We will explore the Western Hemisphere’ natural and colonial worlds from the African slave cultivation of rice
in colonial Brazil to how Russian charted businesses forced the extinction of the Sea Cow in the Bering Sea. The seminar will also inquire how Europeans mapped the flora and fauna of the Americas to assess the impact of nature on bodies and temperaments. We will then examine how the silver mines of Potosí, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, fueled an empire while creating lasting ecological change. We’ll study the construction of Mexico City over Tenochtitlan and how
Caribbean Black healing practitioners employed localized environmental knowledge, in cities such as Cartagena, to contribute to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. We’ll move north
tracking the spread of European diseases among the Native nations in North America and end examining the extractive economy around the islands of southwest Alaska. This hemispheric approach will allow us to assess the centrality of the natural world to the colonial histories of the Americas and ponder their legacies.

EHUM 6860 / Practices in Community-Engaged Learning

Place, Race and the Environment

Dr. Jeff Rose, Parks, Rec & Tourism

In this interdisciplinary, community-engaged seminar, we will consider the ways in which various constructions of place are informed by dominant narratives of whiteness, maleness, settler colonialism, capitalism, heterosexism, extractivism, and dominionism, among others. Simultaneously, we will center and consider narratives that have often been underrepresented in academia, favoring place-based scholarship, engagements, activism, and artistry from both the Global South and from various marginalized populations within the Global North. In particular, the course will address both fundamental and cutting-edge theoretical debates and empirical contexts, examining weekly critical issues like land back movements, abolition ecologies, awawanenitakik, ecojustice education, biopolitics and necropolitics, degrowth, Anthropocene urbanism, right to the city movements, and critical participatory mapping.

EHUM 6101 Foundations in Environmental Humanities

Dr. Jeffrey McCarthy, Environmental Humanities & Honors College

Foundations is designed to introduce students to the broad foundations of environmental thought; it is a survey of cultural, ethical, historical, social, communication, and literary perspectives representing environmental humanities inquiry. Emphasis is placed on theoretical and research traditions. We will study an array of themes, issues, questions, and debates within the humanities and sciences. We will explore how human societies affect the environment, and how human societies are shaped by the environment, as well as how we come to recognize and understand changing environmental conditions. We will address issues associated with knowledge, meaning, justice, crisis, and sustainability.

At the end of the class the student will be able: 1) to evaluate major debates and perspectives within environmental thought; 2) to explicate concepts and ideas associated with the major paradigms; 3) to detail the historical development of environmental thought; 4) to apply different theories to the social and natural world; 5) to develop an informed perspective and approach to evaluate contemporary environmental problems, issues associated with justice/equality, and society/nature relationships; and (6) to propose paths of transformation and alternative futures. 

EHUM 6102 / Research Methods in Environmental Humanities

Dr. Elizabeth Callaway, Environmental Humanities & English

Field Methods is the second foundational course for the Environmental Humanities Program; it is designed to introduce the research methods available to scholars of the environmental humanities. As an inherently interdisciplinary field, environmental humanities has no predetermined or required research methods. Indeed, environmental humanities scholars employ a variety of analytical approaches that are determined by the scale, scope, and content of their research questions. By examining a set of exemplary texts – or “touchstones” – that draw on one or more of these approaches, we will aim for a better understanding of how and in what ways different research methods can enhance the pursuit of environmentally-oriented projects. Unlike traditional methods classes, you will not emerge with expertise in a particular methodology. Rather, as our reading and discussion schedule indicates, you will receive an introductory base of knowledge about different methods (e.g., ecocriticism, ethnography, visual studies, creative non-fiction), and our expectation is that you will use this knowledge to develop and articulate your own methodological focus.

EHUM 6850 / Issues in Environmental Humanities

Anthropocentrism & interrelations under climate change

Dr. Angela Robinson, Environmental Humanities & Gender Studies

The formidable impacts of climate change require profoundly rethinking our understandings of the human’s place in the world. Resolving climate change entails massive upheavals in the way power and capital accumulates, as well as in the very onto-epistemological underpinnings of what the human is and what it means for humans to be in relation to other species, other matter, and other worlds. This course examines this challenge from an interdisciplinary perspective; drawing from climate science, art and cultural production, queer theory, Indigenous and critical race studies, new materialisms, and animal studies. Together, we will explore historical constructions of the human, the co-constitutive nature of this human and climate change, and what new relations might be necessary for humans under climate change.

EHUM 6105 / EH Writing Seminar

Mr. Mark Sundeen, Visiting Instructor, University of Montana

This is a workshop for writing prose: memoir, personal essay, lyric essay, narrative journalism, travel stories, and any hybrid thereof. Works of fiction will also be considered. Each student will submit three pieces during the semester to be discussed in class. Workshops will focus on five basic elements of craft: voice, character, theme, structure, and plot. We will also hone the skill of providing verbal and written feedback: learning to comment on peers’ work with insights that are honest, kind, and constructive.

As this is a nonfiction course, I do not suggest that you make stuff up (unless it’s really good). However, I encourage you to freely borrow techniques from fiction and poetry to find your distinctive voice.

Reading List. The texts are not typical “environmental” writings. This is because this is a craft class, and exemplary work teaches us to write no matter the genre. And I’d like to spend the semester interrogating what is “the environment,” and asking why so much of its literature has sprung from a narrow slice of the population.

Books

The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr

Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

Guillotine, Eduardo Corral

Essays

My President Was Black, Ta-Nehisi Coates

What Is It About Costco? Emily Mester

The Hunter and His Gun, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz

Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell

A Black Woman Walks Into A Gun Show, Kashauna Cauley

The Land Duke Forgot, Dave Parmenter

The First Morning, Amy Irvine (from Desert Cabal)

Mimis in the Middle, Domingo Martinez

Fiction

Crown of Thorns, Louise Erdrich (from Love Medicine)

Indian Education, Sherman Alexie

Poems

“She Had Some Horses,” Joy Harjo

“Why I Hate Raisins,” Natalie Diaz

EHUM 6850 /  Issues in Environmental Humanities

Indigital Environments: Evaluating the Intersection between Digital and Biological Environments in an Indigenous Context

Dr. Aislinn McDougall

While, in many ways, the 21st century has housed a necessary turn of attention toward environmental issues both local and global, this century has also played host to the fast and sometimes unnerving proliferation of digital and internet technologies. Of course, the digital seems wholly at odds with ecological and environmental concerns—its hardware alone requires massive, industrial manufacturers, not to mention the server space and energy required to run its various softwares and programs. Yet, as environmental humanities requires a consideration of the environment as inherently tied to the humanities, and with the more recent rise of digital humanities discourse, mustn’t we include the digital in our understanding of environmental humanities? This notion is nicely exemplified by Stéfan Sinclair and Stephanie Posthumus who offer a Venn diagram that merges “digital,” “environment” and “humanities” to propose “digital environmental humanities” (372). This amalgamation of the digital, the environment and the humanities offers a fruitful lens through which we can engage the world around us. Yet, what have long remained central to discourse around environmental issues, and what are more recently emerging in the digital humanities are Indigenous expressions of, perspectives on and responses to questions of place, space, land, identity, community and justice. This course works to merge the fields of digital humanities and environmental humanities, as a means of illuminating the productive, and even sometimes problematic result of such a combination, focusing on the distinct question of “Indigital” environments. This course surveys a variety of texts including criticism, theory, nonfiction, literature, digital media, video games and social media, all of which illuminate the intersection between digital and biological environments in a strictly Indigenous context.