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 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 6805 / Community-Based Research Praxis

Dr. Danielle Endres, Communication and Fiona Summers, Environmental Humanities

This new one-credit course is encouraged for Environmental Humanities students involved in community-engaged research and is mandatory for those with funding for such research. It offers a supportive space to learn best practices, reflect on experiences, and build a supportive network. This course, which may be repeated up to four times, complements EHUM 6860 by focusing on the practical application of the theoretical foundation provided in the seminar course.

EHUM 6850/ENGL 6810 / Issues in Environmental Humanities

AI and the Environment

Dr. Elizabeth Callaway, English

Artificial intelligence permeates every aspect of our lives, but our lives are not the limit of its reach. The applications of AI extend beyond the human to touch the lives of the plants and animals with whom we share the planet. While tech developers and popular journalism tend to view AI as either an environmental savior or an environmental destroyer, in this class we will use fictional accounts of nonhuman intelligence to explore how the environmental crisis and the current deployment of AI are related in complex ways. Science fiction texts reveal, for example, how risky AI and environmental crisis are twinned, stemming from the same underlying economic model that prioritizes growth over thoughtful, considered development. Literary analysis also highlights how these two emergencies share a rhetorical problem in which harms are positioned as being a problem for the future, obscuring the damage occurring right now. Finally, science fiction models a helpful shift in focus away from how to build a less harmful tool toward the concepts and frameworks that underly technologies and determine what kinds of tools are even possible.

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 / HIST 7670 Issues in Environmental Humanities

Global Environmental History

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

This course seeks to introduce students to the ways in which American environmental historians contributed to the rise of environmental history writing beyond the United States and Europe. On the one hand, the course introduces students to cutting-edge works exploring other a variety of world regions from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia to polar regions like Antarctica. This broader exposure prepares students to teach non-US environmental courses and to be more open to taking advantage of exciting methodological developments unfolding beyond their home areas of specialization.

On the other hand, this course also really thinks seriously about how historians and humanists must grapple with unfamiliar geographical and temporal scales. While thoughtful students will immediately understand that climate change is a global or planetary question, most will not have any training that would prepare them to write about issues at these scales. Likewise, as environmental historians and humanists grapple with debates surrounding the periodization of climate change, increasingly definitions of the Anthropocene and competing theoretical frameworks simultaneously force us to consider both the entire planet and expand our conception of time from more conventional chunks like decades and centuries to the billions of years required the “deep time” of geological scales.

Thus, while humanists have a critical role in narrating the human and non-human agents of climate change, we also face unprecedented changes to the demands placed on our disciplinary and methodological toolkits. And while some of our work as historians might take place in the sheltered coves of our disciplinary specialisms, writing and teaching the stories of global climate change often finds us wading into unfamiliar waters. This requires us to engage with, collaborate alongside, and even compete with scientists, journalists, and writers of fiction in exciting and dauntingly novel ways.

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

Since settler-colonial westward expansion in the Americas, the desert has been a contested landscape, dominantly viewed by new arrivals as a wasteland. These other-worldly landscapes have served as nuclear test sites for the federal government, landfills for faraway coastal cities, sites of mining and other forms of extraction, and are continually proposed as nuclear waste storage facilities. In this course, we will consider the ways in which the desert is reframed in interdisciplinary literature from wasteland to wonderland—and explore the many different artistic, philosophical, and political perceptions of this concept. Ultimately, we will travel to the Utah desert for a three-day excursion during which we can experience and reflect on the desert wonderland—whatever that may mean—for ourselves.

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.