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Accepted Contribution:
The role of fieldwork in environmental history/humanities
Andrea Gaynor
(The University of Western Australia)
Hello! I would be keen to contribute to this roundtable based on my experience of teaching a fieldwork unit in environmental humanities, in which we take a small group of students to a small town called Denmark, 420km away from their home University, and immerse them in a program of talks, workshops and exercises. We use a framework of noticing-knowing-caring, starting with the proposition that understanding and empathy starts with noticing, then moving to reflections on the forms of knowledge we might use to understand what we have noticed, and how this engagement might translate into care. By taking the students out of their usual environment, and exposing them to local people's stories (in, it must be said, a strikingly beautiful part of the world), they experience both a range of ways of engaging with the materiality of place, and the utility of history in coming to understand a place. I can speak to both the challenges and rewards of fieldwork, as well as the relationship between environmental humanities and environmental history.