The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities

A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations

“…This latter aim has given rise to closely associated terms including 'new materialism' and the 'ontological turn' (Pellizzoni 2015), as well as 'more-than-human' and 'posthuman' perspectives (Panelli 2010). Scholarship associated with relational thinking now spans a dizzying number of disciplines and fields, including human geography (Whatmore 2002;Castree 2003aCastree , 2003bMurdoch 2006;Jones 2009), sociology (Emirbayer 1997;DeLanda 2006;Dépelteau 2018), science and technology studies (Latour 1993(Latour , 2005Law 2007), psychology (Hartig 1993;Mitchell and Aron 1999;Clarke et al 2007), policy studies and public administration (Cook and Wagenaar 2012; Bartels and Turnbull 2019); Indigenous studies (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003;Bawaka Country et al 2013); social and political theory (Coole and Frost 2010; Bennett 2010), political ecology (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003;Jarosz 2011), organization studies (Langley and Tsoukas 2017), environmental humanities (Heise et al 2017), and many more. While there are many resonances between these expressions of relational thinking, each is situated within -and responds to -the particular concerns and histories of its respective field, and so uses 'relationality' to perform distinct kinds of conceptual and empirical work.…”

Social scientific research on the American West: current debates, novel methods, and new directions

“…Scholars show that during periods of high human migration, there is a corresponding increase in attention toward the importance of native plant and animal species, such as during the late nineteenth century in the United States when early campaigns to eradicate nonnative species emerged (Coates 2006). Jessica Cattelino's (2017) study of environmental politics in the Everglades shows how this focus on the indigeneity of plants and animals exists in an uneasy correspondence with the Indigenous political claims of Native American Nations. Recent scholarship on the politics of indigeneity centers the struggles of Indigenous nations to seek redress for ongoing and historic harms emerging from settler colonial dispossession, including how to manage for culturally important plants no longer able to establish themselves in particular places due to environmental change.…”

Doing environmental humanities: inter/transdisciplinary research through an underwater 360° video poem

“…As far as the environmental humanities field is concerned, its background has no single geographical starting point or disciplinary precursor. From four recent introductions to environmental humanities, one can immediately grasp that the field includes lateral genealogies and strives to develop innovative forms of multi-and interdisciplinary research (DeLoughrey, Didur and Carrigan 2016;Heise, Christensen and Niemann 2016;Oppermann and Iovino 2017;Emmett and Nye 2017). This has led to several different conceptions of the field.…”

“…Single-discipline researchers in environmental humanities therefore have a chance, not just to combine their own research with that of other disciplinary specialists but also to ensure that the field is not monopolised or dominated by any one particular disciplinary group (Janz 1994). One can already see how environmental humanities discourse solidifies and breaks apart at the international and local levels, with ecocriticism dominating the discourse in the USA and United Kingdom, environmental history dominating it in Europe and anthropology and philosophy dominating it in Australia (while it must be mentioned that feminist, gender, transgender and queer studies have and continue to play an important role in each of these locations) (Heise, Christensen and Niemann 2016;Oppermann and Iovino 2017;Emmett and Nye 2017). 6 In sum, ecocriticism and environmental humanities have different intellectual histories, responding to different historical contexts.…”