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- Convenors:
-
Joana Gaspar de Freitas
(Center for History of the University of Lisbon)
Peter Alagona Peter Alagona (University of California, Santa Barbara)
James McCann (Boston University)
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- Discussants:
-
Andy Kirk
(University of Nevada Las Vegas)
Mark Carey (University of Oregon)
Adrian Howkins (University of Bristol)
Shreyashi Bhattacharya (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Streams:
- Expanding the Practice of Environmental History
- Location:
- Room 20
- Sessions:
- Friday 23 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This roundtable brings together a panel of scholars experienced in developing transdisciplinary approaches and interested in sharing and discussing experiences of creative collaborative research
Long Abstract:
Environmental historians are accustomed to engaging and sometimes collaborating with researchers across multiple disciplines who study ecological processes and social-environmental dynamics. The notion of historians working alone in archives and then sole-authoring narrative books by themselves is rapidly eroding, or at least broadening considering not only the diversity of sources environmental historians can use but also due to the urgency of environmental problems, from climate change to species extinctions. In this roundtable, we will discuss both how to broaden/ expand/ adjust the research methods that environmental historians use in order to better collaborate and reach broader audiences across multiple disciplines, and how to communicate historical methods differently so that they can be understood outside our discipline, which can help not only cross-disciplinary collaboration and conversations, but also making history relevant for current environmental conversations and policymaking. Going beyond history, working with different knowledge and practices, engaging with multiple generations and communities, embracing creative thinking, is a transformative process for those who embark on it, full of pitfalls, but also open to enlightening opportunities and inspiring learning.
This session it will take the form of a roundtable discussion, with up to five participants (Mark Carey, Adrian Howkins, Peter Alagona, Joana Gaspar de Freitas and one more to determine later) offering brief (5-minute) case study-based comments, and then opening the floor to a dialogue with the audience for an exchange of experiences, doubts and suggestions.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Friday 23 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
I will discuss twenty years of collaborations with a range of experts in other disciplines working to reconciles the methods, theories and historiography of environmental with the practice of cultural resource management in the U.S. and internationally.
Contribution long abstract:
My current collaborative multidisciplinary project is an effort to create a "multiple property document" for environmentally sensitive coastal sites that are associated with the history of surfing in California and Hawaii. Collaborators include a non-profit coastal environmental organization and the U.S. National Park Service office of cultural programs.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper applies the ethno-graphy method in mapping changing temporal trajectories surrounding Kolkata’s wastewaterscape, and discusses the novelty of the method in forging interactive collaborative governance to protect nature-culture heritage (SDG 11.4).
Contribution long abstract:
Recent water studies in the global south, despite their thorough documentation and critical historical and socio-ecological analysis over the years, remain fragmented and limited as a result of the continued separation of disciplinary methods and lack of long-term and action-based academia-stakeholder collaboration. We propose the application of the Ethno-graphy method that integrates mainstream ethnography/qualitative techniques and archival research with visual-graphical representations accommodating plural perspectives and aspirations of researchers, inhabitants as well as policymakers in reimagining urban nature towards more just and solution-oriented conjectures.
Our story focuses on the heritage wastewaterscape of Kolkata, the East Kolkata Wetlands, a historically contested space that has evolved across interactions of colonial hydrology and social indigenous practices and intra-actions among more-than-human enactments (coliform bacteria, water hyacinth, algae, fishes etc.). The application of the transdisciplinary Ethno-graphy lens in this region, deployed through academia-practitioner alliance, captures the historicity as well as everyday spatialities and non-linear storylines of multispecies risks, resilience and wellbeing in the wetlands. The transgression of these disciplinary boundaries, from mulidisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity, offers to expand the explorative ambit of environmental history in terms of more viable methodological design through inclusive epistemologies, transitioning to an engaged praxis for a desirable Anthropocene.