Environmental Humanities Lab
The HRC’s Environmental Humanities Lab is a convening ground centering humanistic inquiry in a broader field of transdisciplinary environmental scholarship. We understand Environmental Humanities as an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry that seeks to understand, interpret, and diagnose how social and cultural relationships with the natural world are mediated by texts, media, art, history, and embodied experience. In 2022-23 year, the Lab’s projects center questions of environmental “modes of study.” From exploring the philosophical significance of ecologically-oriented loose parts play, to Black- and Indigenous-led community agricultural projects to re-evaluations of universities’ many roles in perpetuating the climate crisis, we are exploring both practical and speculative infrastructural transformations that can lay the foundations for meaningful social and ecological transformations.
Meet the Team
Jesse Goldstein, Ph.D.
Lab Director
Jesse Goldstein is an associate professor of Sociology, and author of Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism. His work explores the cultural political economy of rich world environmentalism, from biomimicry and other techno-fixes to the logics of settler futurity and green Keynesianism.
Upcoming Events
February 21, 2023
Growing Kale, Shifting Power and Building Food Sovereignty
6:00 p.m. (hybrid event)
Institute for Contemporary Art
The speaker for this event is Malik Yakini, co-founder and Executive Director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.
March 2, 2023
Petro-Time
6:00 p.m. (hybrid event)
Location TBA
The speaker for this event is Heather Davis, assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York.
May 1, 2023
Do Whales Judge Us?: Interspecies History and Ethics
4:00 p.m. (hybrid event)
Institute for Contemporary Art
The speaker for this event is Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.
Programming
Past Events
Thinking at the End of the World: The Work of the Environmental Humanities [video]
The speaker for this virtual event was Stephanie Foote, Jackson and Nichols Chair and Professor of English at West Virginia University.
Gathering Futures: Speculative Fiction as Transformative Possibility During the Climate Crisis [video]
The speaker for this event was Phoebe Wagner, writer, editor, and academic working at the intersection of climate change and speculative fiction.
WAMPUM Framework: Indigenous Climate Change Adaptation Strategies [video]
The speaker for this virtual event was Kelsey Leonard, Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate, and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo.
Water and Land: Indigenous Performance as Invitation to Action [video]
The speaker for this virtual event was Bethany Hughes, assistant professor in the Department of American Culture and a core faculty member in the Native American Studies Program at the University of Michigan.
The Seed Keeper Reading & Discussion*
The speaker for this event was Diane Wilson, writer, speaker, educator, and author of "The Seed Keeper" (Milkweed, 2021).
*To view the protected event video, please reach out to hrc@vcu.edu.