Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks is a DFG-AHRC funded project at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich (Germany), and the University of Leeds (UK). The project focuses on three European transboundary national park areas: the Pyrenees, the Bavarian Forest and Šumava, and the Wadden Sea Biosphere Reserve. It uses comparative literature, visual ethnography and environmental history methodologies to connect insights into human culture, values, history, and behaviour that are central to humanities and social sciences research to nature conservation science and practice. It aims to foster a conservation that is more culturally aware, more aware of human behaviour and values, and more aware of the ethical complexities of its work by applying the “corridor talk” metaphor in three ways: to address and support the material ecological corridors that link protected sites; to address and support the symbolic corridors that connect governance and cultural perspectives on protected sites; and to bring humanities research into discussions on nature conservation.
Literature and the Wadden Sea is a guide for teaching Wadden Sea literature in advanced university courses in Scandinavian, Danish, German or Dutch language and literature or comparative literary studies programmes, and for integrating literature into courses in other disciplines. It can be found at www.waddensealiterature.com . This article lays out the development of this project and the contents and objectives of the Teaching Toolkit. It also suggests how it can be used as a model for teaching that couples literature with other protected places, be they national parks, nature reserves or other places. Finally, it concludes with our initial findings, plans and hopes for the subsequent development of the project.
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