Abstract: Last year, the Resilience collective—Stephanie Foote, Anthony Lioi, and Dana Luciano—asked a range of environmental humanists to speculate about the state of the field for this double issue marking the tenth anniversary of the journal’s publication. In part, we imagined this as a call-back to the journal’s first issue. Resilience 1.1 was entirely dedicated to a suite of manifestos about the environmental humanities. Some of those essays described the state of the field, some argued for the value of how the humanities could contribute to ongoing conversations about environmental policies, histories, and philosophies, and still others pointed out the work the humanities had yet to do in order to address the knotted ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The 2010s will go down in intellectual history as the decade when the environmental humanities belatedly awoke to the realization of global overheating as the crisis par excellence to which all others are to be subordinated or referred.The awakening has been a joyless one despite the brilliance of the best intellectual work, some of it in these pages, that has parsed and propagated it. How can one be enthusiastic about a train wreck that “we” have engineered yet seem powerless to stop' If, as I suspect, Anthropocene anxiety is more responsible than any other factor for mainstreaming environmental concerns in humanities research and teaching, how much satisfaction can be taken in that' Perhaps not even the mordant ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: “We can now see more clearly than ever how life’s intricate complexity is essential for our own survival. But biodiversity is collapsing, and our climate is changing.”1 Narrated by David Attenborough, so opens a recent documentary released on Netflix titled Breaking Boundaries (2021). The film is unflinching in cataloguing the evidence for and ramifications of anthropogenic climate change, interweaving geological records and computational projections with scenes of congested highways, melting glaciers, and wildfire-devastated forests. In the same breath, Attenborough tells the viewer to feel alarm and eschew nihilism. To advance that narrative, the film holds up scientific research and technological innovation as ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: I suspect that many of the authors in this issue will suggest that it’s time to double down on serious, environmentally minded (or even better, environmentally accountable) scholarship, and similarly, that it’s also time to use any and all platforms available to us to get our work into circulation, with the aim of improving the public discourse around climate crisis, biodiversity loss, environmental justice, and so on. This means, of course, that in addition to publishing, teaching, and giving talks, we are expanding our typical audiences to those outside the academy.I am all for following such recommendations; in fact, my own work has gone in those directions since my first book on ecology in video games came ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Happy anniversary to Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities! A decade is an impressive duration for an academic journal to flourish, a testament to the community of editors, writers, and readers who support its work—as well as to the continued relevance of rigorous ecological thinking in the face of relentless catastrophe. The vision statement for Resilience observes that the “vibrant interdisciplinary field” of environmental humanities was coming into being about five years before the journal was launched.1 Its authors articulate the discipline’s missions in a way that continues to resound powerfully.Scholars of the environmental humanities engage with the natural and social sciences, whose ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the Museum of Ethnography (Etnografiska Museet) in Stockholm, Sweden, there is an ongoing exhibition entitled “Human/Nature.”1 The order in the title is important because Nature is written upside down in a suggestive shape that allows us to visualize through the lexicographic order the burden of the former over the latter. Not only does the vertical hierarchy denote the “supremacy” of Human over Nature but also the inverted nature of “Nature” implies a bewildered, puzzled, and stunned Nature as if Order reigned over Confusion.As one enters the exhibition, the first installation is set up in a bright vestibule organized conceptually around consumerism. A grocery cart full of useless objects greets the spectator ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: When you try to imagine the environmentally friendly city of the future, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t leap to mind. To be successful in the cities where this video game series has been set over the last two decades, players need to win car races, rob banks, deal or steal drugs, and survive shoot-outs with cops, security guards, and rivals. Violence and vulgarity are routine, often tainted with misogyny and racism. Whether the action is set in London, Miami, New York, or San Francisco, Grand Theft Auto derives its dynamic and suspense from clichéd representations of urban life: as a player, you become the gangster who steals and crashes cars, fights and shoots—and if you crash your car, you just steal another; if you ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: “It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom.”In 1997, the postcolonial scholar Ariel Salleh offered her groundbreaking environmental intervention into Marxism, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. There, she argues that eco-socialists’ theory of the intersection of labor and environmental destruction has failed to account for the experiences of women, who constitute the “global labour majority” if we acknowledge the unpaid “gift” of biological and social reproductive labor alongside their industrial labor.1 She posits that the “unlivable exploitations” women endure resulting from performing that labor under patriarchal forms of capitalism have ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Some ten years ago, Stephanie Foote and I met at the University of Illinois during a conference about sustainability. At the time, we were associate professors of literature working on our second books—hers about garbage and mine about fossil fuels. Together, we wondered if it was possible to create a journal where work like ours could be effectively reviewed by bringing together readers from various disciplines. For example, could someone who has expert knowledge on the histories of oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico review my work alongside a scholar of the novel' I knew that I needed to be fact checked, and I wanted to be assured that what I wrote could travel a little distance from the relatively small ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: “Film is fun. It’s like the Humanities on steroids.”A few weeks ago, the quote above from a 2014 Facebook post cycled into my feed. It made me chuckle now, as it had then almost ten years ago. I remember that the student was writing about Her, the 2013 critically acclaimed Hollywood film about Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falling in love with his virtual assistant Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). Apple’s Siri had just been launched on iPhones, and director Spike Jonze’s story sped us into an imagined near-future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) had evolved to be gorgeously sentient and emotive. Her was intentionally meant to raise ethical questions of what it means to have sentient machines and thus, what it means to ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The last several years have been relentless, tragic, and overwhelming. Trump became President. George Floyd was publicly executed. A worldwide pandemic has been raging for more than two years that has killed over a million Americans and upended the most basic ways we live our daily lives. There was a presidential coup attempt at the US Capitol that could easily have led to the beating or death of the vice president, the Speaker of the House, and many other members of Congress. There is currently a genocidal land war in Europe that raises the spectral possibility of nuclear war. It looks as if Roe is about to be overturned, and with it a fifty-year-old constitutional right for women to control the most intimate ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It is now crystal clear that the fight for the future of our communities and biosphere in the face of global anthropogenic climate disruption will not be decided on the merits of climate science. It will not be decided based on how strong or impressive any scholar’s statistical correlations, complex mathematical formulas, or multicolored charts and graphs might be. The wonderful “convenient truth” about climate change/disruption is that we have always had the tools for moving toward an ecological healthy, equitable, and just climate reality: narratives and stories reflect our lived and embodied experiences with climate and environmental injustices and they offer deep, transformative solutions. In this essay I ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Dear Friend,I’ve been reading interviews, essays, poems, and letters that the Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde wrote after surviving Hurricane Hugo in St. Croix in 1989 (she had moved there recently to recover from treatment for cancer). I am learning from Lorde about practices for what I’m thinking about as environmental sanctuary, practices of refuge in community that take into account the heightened vulnerability of the planet and our place in it. Hurricanes, after all, don’t respect a border or a distinction between “territory” and “mainland,” “state” and “citizenship.”“Sanctuary” has historically referred to the faith-based movement for migration justice that began in the 1980s in response to migration ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The one window in Anna and Harry’s basement was just above ground. Even in July it only let in a small slice of sun. In late fall, all it revealed was soggy, Vancouver grey. The cement walls might have looked modern in the early 70s when the house was built. Now, fifty years later, they didn’t.“It feels like a medieval dungeon,” said Harry. “How can you work down here, love'”“It’s quiet,” replied Anna. “I can think. And I can listen to the CBC while I’m working without the kids complaining.”Anna worked on her “pedestrian art,” as she called it, at a battered, pine table underneath the one fluorescent light in the middle of the room. Every November, she absorbed herself in huge clumps of donated Christmas lights for ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The environmental humanities must, and will, center trans ecologies. I make this declaration at a time of renewed assaults on transgender human rights; hundreds of pieces of anti-trans legislation have been introduced in the United States since 2021.1 Alabama doctors who prescribe hormones for trans youth face felony charges and ten years in prison, while Missouri has considered banning gender transitioning for adults.2 But this is also a moment of possibility, when contemporary culturemakers are imagining new futures of cis-trans solidarity, cross-species sensitivity, and trans mutual aid. Therefore, by “trans ecologies” I refer less to an academic subfield—though that is certainly extant and growing—and more ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: 1. Are the environmental humanities a ‘crisis discipline’' If not, should it conceive of itself in these terms' What are the implications—critical, analytic, and political—of imagining the environmental humanities in this way' And what are the implications of not doing so'The term ‘crisis discipline’ was introduced by scholar and activist Robert Cox in the inaugural issue of Environmental Communication.1 It was intended to help the readers and contributors of this new journal ask themselves whether the study of communication about the environment brought with it specific political and intellectual commitments. Could the field of environmental communication imagine itself as just another field of academic study ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: From re (back) and salire (to jump, leap), “the act of rebounding or springing back; rebound, recoil”—The Oxford English Dictionary sets the first usage of resilience in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth adds “elasticity; the power of resuming the original shape or position after compression, bending, etc.” Less common usages include: “revolt, recoil from something,” and “repugnance, antagonism.” Although largely fallen out of usage, the less common meanings make sense: to leap back suggests an act of recovery, but also of repugnance; we leap back in disgust. The richness of the word with all of its meanings captures the ambivalence the West in particular has expressed toward the organic world ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Teachers are not performers in the traditional sense of the word in that our work is not meant to be a spectacle. Yet it is meant to serve as a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active participants in learning.“Imagine,” a 2015 writing assignment for undergraduate students prompted, “that your book review will appear in a publication with an audience not unlike that for The New York Review of Books (we read two book review essays from its pages earlier in the term).”1 It instructed, “Click over to their website to refresh your memory. Get a feel for who The Review is written,” and continued, “This audience, while clearly knowledgeable about some things, may not be familiar with ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-02T00:00:00-05:00