Can the University be a Liveable Institution in the Anthropocene?

Wright, Susan

doi:10.1007/978-94-6351-116-2_2

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Archaeology excels at telling such stories and its position in the public eye provides us with an opportunity for making them heard. Wright (2017) has recently argued for viewing the university as an ecosystem. I suggest that this notion can be usefully extended to archaeology as a discipline.…”

Section: Strategies Of Engagement In An Ecosystem Of Knowledge and Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deep Pasts – Deep Futures A Palaeoenvironmental Humanities Perspective from the Stone Age to the Human Age

Riede

2021

csa

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Coagulating around the powerful notion of the Anthropocene – the proposed geological epoch of the ‘Human Age’ where anthropogenic control of and impact on nature has taken on a magnitude comparable to geological forces – many traditional humanities disciplines are rediscovering the environment as worthy of study. Ranging from eco-criticism to anthropology and history, the environmental humanities are dismantling the founding divisions of academic practice that confine the study of ‘nature’ to the natural sciences and the study of human society, culture, politics and ethics to the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, one of the environmental humanities’ most central contributions has been in addressing the question of ethical involvement when it comes to environmental research that has relevance in contemporary climate change debates. With its long-standing multidisciplinary affiliations and its many outstanding case studies of how the climates of the deep past have affected contemporaneous communities and how these communities have shaped their environs at various scales, archaeology is well positioned to contributing here. Yet, the discipline has so far been marginal in these emerging debates. Drawing on selected examples from the deepest Stone Age to the most recent past, I attempt in this keynote paper to bring together thoughts about the national framing of archaeological practice, archaeological interpretation and heritage management in Europe with preoccupations about past societal collapse under the umbrella of environmental ethical concerns. I argue ultimately that archaeology and archaeologists should involve themselves in environmental debates and in the wider environmental humanities project, but caution that due diligence is needed when operating in such a politically charged debate where personal and political opinions can swiftly overshadow supposedly objective scientific attitudes – and where sceptics stand ready to exploit such bias as well as the uncertainties inherent in archaeological knowledge. Nonetheless, archaeologists can contribute to contemporary climate debates in numerous ways: by writing articles for journals that influence policy-making upstream, through museum practice, and by collaborating with practitioners implementing climate change adaptation measures. I provide brief examples for these avenues and suggest that by re-orientating environmental archaeological engagements in this way, the discipline can gain relevance and recognition, and make a genuine contribution to solving one of our times’ most wicked problems.

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Section: Strategies Of Engagement In An Ecosystem Of Knowledge and Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deep Pasts – Deep Futures A Palaeoenvironmental Humanities Perspective from the Stone Age to the Human Age

Riede

2021

csa

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“…By acknowledging its own situatedness in this intellectual landscape, the pEH approach encourages a celebration of epistemological diversity in human-climate research. It also encourages an active contributionthrough teaching, research and mentoring-to the making of the "ecological university" (Barnett, 2011;Wright, 2017) and the "slow hope" (Mauch, 2019) of the intergenerational change in a shared planetary future that it offers. Archeology lends itself as an anchoring discipline for this larger enterprise due to its long-standing position at the interface between the environmental and climate sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other.…”

Section: Implications and Responsibility Of An " Eco-critical" Archmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By acknowledging its own situatedness in this intellectual landscape, the pEH approach encourages a celebration of epistemological diversity in human–climate research. It also encourages an active contribution – through teaching, research and mentoring—to the making of the “ecological university” (Barnett, 2011; Wright, 2017) and the “slow hope” (Mauch, 2019) of the intergenerational change in a shared planetary future that it offers.…”

Section: Implications and Responsibility Of An “Eco‐critical” Archeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Paleoenvironmental humanities: Challenges and prospects of writing deep environmental histories

Hussain

Riede

2020

WIREs Climate Change

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Environmental uncertainty, climate change, and ecological crisis loom large in the present and permeate scenarios of potential futures. To understand these predicaments and prepare for potentially catastrophic scenarios, there have been repeated calls to explore the diverse human–climate relations of human societies in the past. The archeological record offers rich datasets on human–environment articulations reflected in artifacts, ecofacts, and their relational entanglements. Much of these human–environment conjugations are, in the absence of written records, only accessible archeologically, yet that discipline has played little role in the “environmental turn” of the humanities or the climate change debate. In an effort to articulate archeological research traditions with these concerns, we frame the notion of the paleoenvironmental humanities (pEH): a deep‐time training ground for current ideas and theories on the interrelationship of human behavior, climate, and environmental change. The key objective of the pEH is to offer a rejoinder between ecological reductionism and the adoption of full‐scale environmental relativism, opening up new interpretive and comparative terrain for the examination of human–climate relations. We probe the potential of this perspective by drawing on insights from Pleistocene archeology. The long‐term temporalities of the Pleistocene, we argue, promote alternative imaginaries of the human–climate nexus and draw attention to similarly long‐term futures. We end our proposal with a reflection on the responsibility of archeological practitioners to balance hopeful narratives of human adaptability with those of societal collapse, countering the emergent linkage between climate skepticism and right‐wing nationalism, and to bring such issues to public attention. This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives

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“…Importantly for Tsing, her ruins are an ambivalent space of multiple connections or contaminations, where profound discomfort sits alongside potential renewal, so that surprising and unpredictable things emerge. These ideas, when applied to the university, call not for resistance or triumphing over adversity but the ability to connect unexpected and divergent interests, values, people, ideas, and knowledges in liveable landscapes (Wright, 2017). Predation and destruction are a constant threat to those inhabiting the ruins of the university's all‐encompassing grand narratives but opportunities to connect the fragments in new ways may still be found among the patches and cracks in the story.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking gender equity in the contaminated university: A methodology for listening for music in the ruins

Locke

Lund

Wright

2021

Gender Work & Organization

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This paper offers a new way to engage with gender, race, and class relations in academic leadership and organizations. Viewing our research materials through different images helps us to ask new questions, open up new kinds of answers and ultimately other ways of knowing gender and leadership in academia. Our approach has three connected steps. Firstly, we engage with the ruins of the three main promises upon which the contemporary university has been built: enlightenment, liberalism, and feminism, drawing on Anna Tsing's mushrooms at the end of the world and Gibson‐Graham's notion of a post‐capitalist economy. Secondly, we use intersectionality as a methodological lens, combining it with Karen Barad's ideas about how “matter comes to matter.” We explore the intersections between four themes arising from the accounts of our participants: Reshaping the disciplinary field; gender, class, and race; traveling and mobility; and Institutional structures and policies. The third and final step engages with how some women successfully coordinate these intersecting themes to navigate their careers and achieve leadership positions within the contaminated and ruinous university environment. In doing so, we draw on the musical form of the fugue with its four themes that at different moments diverge, clash and, if successful, achieve resolution, to provide us with a way for analyzing the women's stories as “polyphony‐in‐action.” By using this musical approach to retool intersectionality, we are able to show how some women managed to bring all four themes of their lives into symbiosis and achieve value in the ruinous academic landscape.

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Can the University be a Liveable Institution in the Anthropocene?

Cited by 14 publications

References 17 publications

Deep Pasts – Deep Futures A Palaeoenvironmental Humanities Perspective from the Stone Age to the Human Age

Deep Pasts – Deep Futures A Palaeoenvironmental Humanities Perspective from the Stone Age to the Human Age

Paleoenvironmental humanities: Challenges and prospects of writing deep environmental histories

Rethinking gender equity in the contaminated university: A methodology for listening for music in the ruins

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