Contribution short abstract:

While we have yet to adequately address anthropogenic climate change, artistic practice offers insights into sensing and comprehending our changed relations with the world. Sydney Dance Company’s Impermanence, a response to Australia's Black Summer fires, offers ways to feel these challenges.

Contribution long abstract:

The climate crisis grows, swells and inundates, pushing life and lives, human and more-than-human, perhaps beyond what can be endured. Yet, we who have produced this have yet to address this in any adequate way; indeed, we appear to be standing still. Bruno Latour (2018) argues that anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a matter of concern that involves learning ‘how to get our bearings, how to orient ourselves’ (p 2, emphasis in original) towards these futures. Yet, as Justin Westgate points out, ‘the challenges of the Anthropocene are therefore many, but the immediate one is with sensing and comprehending it’ (2017: 238). One problem is that use of the language of ‘extinction’ draws on responses that are not immediately visible or felt.

Artistic practices offer ways to feel, think, move and listen to these challenges. This paper focuses on Sydney Dance Company’s Impermanence conceived in response to the traumatic damages wrought by fire, initially that of Notre Dame in 2019 and then the Australian Black Summer fires of 2019-2020. This performance offers an exploration of both human and more-than-human mobilities as bodies and sound make visible the underlying narrative of these fires and their devastation, what may be thought of as “pretheoretical intuitions” (Roholt 2014) of bodily capacities in movement as a means to explore what happens ‘when we cease to understand the world’ (Labatut 2020).

Contribution short abstract:

This paper examines the intersection of research, public history, and activism, through the experiences of an early career environmental historian in collaborating with public and private institutions, being involved in a National Parc’s scientific board and popularizing science on Twitch.

Contribution long abstract:

“You are part of the landscape now” : this statement comes from a resident participating in a public meeting following a master degree field workshop that I organised in 2019 at the request of a municipality to help resolve a forest management crisis. Thereby the resident underlined a side effect of my involvement in the valley as an historian : I became a stakeholder. This proposal examines the intersection of historical research, public history, and activism, through the experiences of an early career environmental historian. It highlights how doing research while taking public actions can mutually inform and enrich one another, enabling useful strategies for addressing environmental issues.

From past experiences, my proposal discusses the stakes of collaboration with public institutions and private companies, showing how these partnerships can facilitate the implementation of research-driven initiatives. Furthermore, through my involvement in the scientific council of the Vanoise National Park this proposal underscores the critical role that historical insights can take in shaping sustainable and equitable decisions regarding park management. Afterwards my paper interrogate how history can engage with a broader audience through my experience of creating a Twitch channel aiming to popularize scientific research in the Alps. Throughout, I share insights gained from methodological, ethical, and positioning issues inherent to combining historical research and action that I addressed in my PhD thesis.

By sharing experiences and reflections, this paper hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of how environmental history can engage the ecological crisis stakes, without denying its epistemological foundations.

Contribution short abstract:

My contribution takes an infrastructural approach to environmental history to illustrate ways of engaging wider publics with historical knowledge. I draw on my recent films, a ‘walkshop’ and a digital tour on Berlin’s infrastructure history and an ongoing project on usable infrastructure pasts.

Contribution long abstract:

I would like to enrich the roundtable with recent experiences in engaging diverse publics in my research on Berlin’s infrastructure history and ongoing work that systematizes ways of mobilizing ‘usable pasts’ to inform debates on sustainable futures. Whilst writing my book "Remaking Berlin. A History of the City through Infrastructure, 1920-2020", I was involved in the production of a series of short films about my research that take viewers to intriguing sites of infrastructure history where they meet infrastructure specialists and hear my reflections from an academic perspective (https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/das_unsichtbare_berlin?nav_id=8405). I also co-convened a workshop of practitioners and politicians to explicitly discuss the relevance of my findings on Berlin’s infrastructure history for contemporary challenges to the city’s sustainable development. Since the book’s publication, I have organized a ‘walkshop’ for the general public that takes people to sites of urban technology to explain their political and environmental relevance in the past, but also for the future. This tour has since gone digital, comprising aerial and 360-degree photography, historical images and audio inputs by myself (https://www.36o.de/remaking-berlin/). Currently, I am working on a DFG-funded project, entitled “Past-proofing Infrastructure Futures: Usable Histories of Urban Technology Today”, that unpacks the concept of usable infrastructure pasts and employs diverse modes of co-productive engagement. These include representing infrastructure in museums, sensitizing utility staff to the value of history and holding workshops on usable infrastructure pasts with local policy makers and infrastructure managers.

Contribution short abstract:

In my presentation I want to explore the possibilities and probabilities of upending traditional history training at the graduate school level to produce stories and histories that live out in the world, beyond the academic context and their impact on the roles and functions of historians.

Contribution long abstract:

So much of academic research and work can be isolating. Thanks to the work of platforms like Environmental History Now, there is now a critical mass of historians reflecting on and sharing their public-facing work. In my presentation, I will talk about how being a part of Environmental History Now, Network in Canadian History and Environment, H-Net, and #FlipTheList have been transformative for me as a historian, scholar, and citizen both in reflecting on my role in the world as well as fulfilling those duties. I will play special attention to how attentive these platforms have made me to my interventions and how to make them. Most of all, these associations have affirmed the centrality of relationships and camaraderie to any intellectual exercise. In being able to create and nestle in a community, I have come to refine my scholarship and intentionality and will share the same, as I continue on my academic path. In so doing, some questions I will be specifically addressing are: Can we offer methodological interventions, especially co-creating stories? What new skills do historians need to cultivate to write in a more publicly accessible manner? How can and should doctoral training differ to cultivate and nurture these skillsets? What does a doctoral program train us to do well?

Contribution short abstract:

Elemental Tours is a walking tour company that shares materially grounded environmental histories of Manchester. In addition to guiding people through their urban environment we are creating a hybrid commons to cultivate environmental humanists and inspire tour participants to environmental action.

Contribution long abstract:

Elemental Tours shares materially grounded environmental history walking tours with participants in Manchester, UK. We are also carrying forward those experiences into a shared digital space. In this roundtable we will discuss how the concrete urban environment can be used to anchor an abstract intellectual space, how a historian can guide public participants through both simultaneously, and how we can unite a physical and digital commons to empower the public to engage with the environmental humanities.

Elemental Tours embraces the material turn in environmental history. In addition to telling stories about the people of Manchester’s past, we introduce our participants to the tangibility of the city so that it too becomes a historical subject. We also encourage them to reflect on the constructed binary between human and non-human and what this means for future interactions with their urban environment.

In the summer of 2022, we premiered a water tour and in 2023 a stone tour. Shortly, we will be adding a blog component to Elemental Tours. Our aim is to bridge the gap between a walking tour experience and continued engagement with the environmental humanities, creating a digital commons to foster the exchange of accessible information on Manchester-based environmental initiatives, work in the environmental humanities more broadly, sustainability initiatives around the globe. We are exploring how to use the online environment alongside the physical, uniting social media with the city to inspire people to think more deeply about their urban environment and take action.