ENG 660

Commons Theories in the environmental humanities 

Fall 2021

As Arctic territories and Pacific island states recede to sea level rise, as wildfires burn through suburban communities in the wealthy world, as global fresh water runs dry, a profound uncertainty shadows what it means to own, to use, and to inhabit—distinctions anxiously defended within colonialist capitalism. Enter the “commons,” a concept and praxis tied to sustainability in the form of stable subsistence in anthropological literatures, to Indigenous economies and sovereignties worldwide, and to historical European peasantries where “the essence of subjectivity” resided in “inhabitancy rather than entrepreneurship,” in Robert Marzec’s phrase. In the shadow of climate change, the commons is an age-old concept with handy meanings for a modernity buckling to neoliberal injury in the forms of privatization, deregulation, and runaway extraction. This seminar places the work of well- known commons theorists (Elinor Ostrom, Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici) in conversation with scholars of the environmental humanities and critical environmental justice (Anna Tsing, Laura Pulido, Rob Nixon, Jedidiah Purdy, Ramachandra Guha) and with scholar/activists in Black and Indigenous Studies (Fred Moten, Leanne Betsamosake Simpson, Winona LaDuke, JT Roane). We will ask what the commons can do and be, in this time of planetary instability and intensifying resource conflicts.

 Syllabus.

ENVS 203

InTRODUCTION TO ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES: HUMANITIES

Spring 2019

In this course we learn about what the humanities are, as an interdisciplinary field, and how humanities methods and research contribute to environmental thought and action. The class involves reading and research but also creativity and innovation. It is a lab in which we will think together about the possible futures of our stressed planet and how to harness imagination in the service of a livable world.

Syllabus.

Life Overlooked Collaborative Pedagogical Project

Life Overlooked is the "citizen humanities" new media project co-developed by Stephanie LeMenager, Joni Adamson, Catriona Sandilands, Patricia Ferrante and others through the Andrew W. Mellon HfE (Humanities for the Environment) Observatory and refined by students at the University of Oregon, York University, and the Arizona State University.

Read about Life Overlooked here.

Center for Environmental Futures Field Schools

2017-ongoing

Site-Specific Environmental Humanities research and pedagogy

Since September 2017, Stephanie LeMenager, Marsha Weisiger, and a host of other University of Oregon faculty (including Gordon Sayre, Steven Beda, Sarah Stapleton, Lucas Silva, Ryan Jones, and Emily Eliza Scott) have accompanied graduate student-scholars on site visits to Oregon’s public lands. On site, we have conducted extensive oral histories (46 to date as of October, 2019), explored local museums, historical monuments, geological features, forests, deserts, and the locations of ecological transition and stress. As employees of Oregon’s flagship public university, we attempt to understand the places in which our students, their families, and our nonhuman kin live, and to invite the varied expertise of the humans and other animals of our region into our own processes of study, research, and writing.