Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Elizabeth Hameeteman
(Technische Universität Berlin)
Julie Sze
Diana Valencia-Duarte (Aberystwyth University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Elizabeth Hameeteman
(Technische Universität Berlin)
Diana Valencia-Duarte (Aberystwyth University)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Streams:
- Expanding the Practice of Environmental History
- Location:
- Room 20
- Sessions:
- Thursday 22 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Based on Environmental History Now's Problems of Place series, this hybrid session will have graduate students and early career scholars who identify as women, trans and/or non-binary people sharing about the importance of community, connection, and belonging in honest, authentic ways.
Long Abstract:
The global pandemic of COVID-19 has trapped many people sheltering “in-place.” Simultaneously, more human activity than ever before is transpiring place-lessly over the internet, in cyber rooms, and digital spaces. These contradictory trends only exacerbate a conundrum common to young scholars in environmental history: the personal/intellectual drive to be rooted in the past and place, versus the economic imperatives to be migratory and mutable. While there are many structural issues that need to be addressed, this session will break some of the tacit silence on a series of problems that drive many scholars, especially those from underrepresented groups, from careers in the academy. How can academia be more inclusive? How can intellectual communities be crafted between heterogeneous individuals, across global distances, and despite economic precarity?
The session features scholars who have written about the importance of community, connection, and belonging for Environmental History Now, an online platform that showcases the environmental-related work and expertise of graduate students and early career scholars who identify as women, trans and/or non-binary people. While its ongoing “Problems of Place” series explores these questions in text, this hybrid session seeks to create a metaphoric place for these conversations to happen live and dynamically, despite spatial distance.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Thursday 22 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
In a six-month long workshop, the sex workers of Mongla painted the reality of climate change in their life and described it. It also helped the community to produce an artistic archive for the future generations to see. occupations.
Contribution long abstract:
The sex workers of Mongla reside on the banks of the Passur River. Their occupational land is being gnawed at by the river forcing them to conduct sex trade on the remaining land or on the boats. The women of Mongla brothel are in a continuous conflict with the Bangladesh Government to safeguard their legal “right to livelihood” since 2010 which should get them secured rehabilitation. However, such struggles have yielded no outcomes yet. The resilience that these ostracized women show at the face of bureaucratic apathy, climatic assaults, and social abandonment is what I term as “Sisyphean Resilience.” Such that, like the Greek hero Sisyphus who rolls the rock on the mountain till the end of time; the women of Mongla also fight the adversities every day with a new zeal. Their uncelebrated life, I realized would undergo trauma if pushed for direct interviews during ethnography. Hence, I resorted to arts-based research as means of an “anthropology of emotions” (Lutz and White: 1986). In a six-month long workshop, the sex workers of Mongla painted the reality of climate change in their life and described it. The artistic project provided the sex workers the space to control their narrative and speak about it without trauma. It also helped the community to produce an artistic archive for the future generations to see. The artistic productions help seal the lacuna caused by year-long erasure of documentation and archive keeping of the communities related to ostracised occupations. Thus, depending on a yearlong fieldwork, transcontinental archival data, literary analysis of local religious literature and periodicals, arts-based research; the paper maps the “amphibious” lives of sex workers in the Mongla Brothel, Bangladesh in the era of Anthropocene.
Contribution short abstract:
Sharing everyday stories of how assumptions about embodiment and place shape environmental fields, I connect insights on extractive practices, place-based research, and ‘an ethic of not going there’ to ideas about accessibility, disability, and care.
Contribution long abstract:
This presentation raises questions about ‘problems of place’ in relation to embodiment, fieldwork, research travel, ethics, and ‘going there’ in environmental history and related fields. It challenges the taken-for-granted nature of ideas about embodiment and travel and how these ideas shape environmental history methodologies and conceptual frameworks. This presentation will connect insights about extractive research practices and critical place-based research to ideas about accessibility, disability, and ethics of care. Drawing on personal/lived experiences – particularly mundane, everyday stories – of how assumptions about embodiment and movement shape research and learning in environmental fields, I will share how the framings of ‘problems of place’ and ‘an ethic of not going there’ help me think through these questions.
Contribution short abstract:
Exploring the successes and failures of Zoom, this presentation explores the ways in which satellite campuses like the University of Utah's Asia Campus in South Korea have taken advantage of digital gathering spaces like Zoom as a way to connect students with scholars and subjects around the world.
Contribution long abstract:
Teaching environmental and spatial history abroad has had its limitations, particularly because spatial politics concepts of environmental racism, placemaking, and ecological imperialism - key to illuminating the legacies of colonialism on cities today - are not currently discussed in Korea. In addition, the language barrier for many in our class as an English-language institution in a Korean-language country creates an obstacle for experiential learning. Zoom not only provided a way for students to meet with one another during Covid but facilitated engagement with scholars, artists, site visits, and activists around the world on the relationship between identity, power, and public space. Through Zoom-centered digital classrooms, students were able to take advantage of digital tools like ChatGPT that are often discouraged in traditional classrooms.
Engaging with diverse methods and classroom engagement spaces so has allowed our campus to make up some of the ground lost to being intentionally excluded by main campuses in the West, while also creating transnational bridges that challenge the America/Korea binary that has problematically grounded our students' experiences. In this presentation, Lovell will shed light on the techniques they have used to bring discussions of spatial politics in environmental history and environmental studies to South Korea, from Zoom to board game design.
Contribution short abstract:
Colonial violence can translate into the language of sustainability through green colonialism. In May, 2023, a two-day event took place in Trondheim with the participation of representatives from the Indigenous communities to discuss its impact on their territories.
Contribution long abstract:
When the protests against the violation of Indigenous rights in Norway erupted in the capital of the country in February 2023, centuries of colonialism in this far north were put on the spotlight, this time in an area where the Nordics consider themselves proud of championing: environmentalism. Moreover, while Norwegian clean energy companies have irrupted in Sampi territories with windfarms, their actions extend to the other side of the ocean, where important rivers for the Mapuche people have been desecrated to install hydroelectric plants that disrupt local ecological balance.
Considering how these acts translate colonial violence into the language of sustainability, a group of migrants in the city of Trondheim, in South Sampi territory, organized a two-day event with the participation of representatives from the Sampi and Mapuche communities. During the encounter, we discussed green colonialism, together with Indigenous epistemologies and cosmovision, and opacity. Moreover, in the very making of the event, key issues were made open to discussion, such as the challenges of multilinguistic and multicultural collaboration, the meanings of solidarity when certain bodies are threatened with incarceration and criminalization, and how to counteract divisive narratives of stereotyping among Indigenous peoples.
As part of the organization team, we will refer in our intervention to the challenges, investments, and learnings in the making of this event, from a feminist standpoint that highlights the personal and the questioning of power. Moreover, we will share experiences as migrant scholars working on environmental justice while based in the global north.
Contribution short abstract:
Many graduate students/early career academics have to contend with feeling "out of place" in the academy. Drawing on personal experiences, I will discuss some ways that people come to forge intellectual spaces that work to affirm a sense of belonging while undertaking academic work.
Contribution long abstract:
Even as calls to advance diversity in and of the academy increase, the actual experiences of people who feel "out of place" in academia are often attributed to intelligence (not knowing enough), commitment (not engaging enough), rigor (not being serious enough), "impostor syndrome" (self-doubt), and other constructs of individual personality. These are divorced from the realities of the social, economic, political and environmental world that shapes these experiences.
In the face of institutional indifference, or outright hostility, how can students/early career-academics forge spaces of belonging in the places that they study, work, and live? In this talk, I will discuss some things I learned through experiences of engaging in or generating intellectual spaces, spanning from within the academy to the neighbourly, and what they offered to navigate graduate school in precarious and disconnected times.