ARTS40430: Environmental Humanities: Frameworks and Debates

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• To introduce students to current, cutting-edge and emergent topics and debates within interdisciplinary research in the environmental humanities.
• To enable students to understand how the histories of environmental degradation and climate change are interlinked with inequalities around gender, race and class.

• This module is the core module for the MA in Environmental Humanities. The environmental humanities is a discipline that has emerged in the last two decades which brings to bear the methods and insights of humanities disciplines on the environmental crisis.
• This module introduces students to a range of disciplinary approaches to the environmental crisis, displaying the ways in which the arts and humanities can complement and to some extent challenge responses that are governed exclusively by scientific and technological norms.
• The module is team-taught, with contributions by staff from a selection of Departments such as Anthropology, English Studies, Geography, History, Modern Languages and Cultures, Philosophy, and Theology and Religion; the precise make-up will differ from year to year. Precise themes to be covered will vary from year to year but may include issues relating to the Anthropocene, the energy humanities, gender, race, class and the environment, and queer ecology; as well as topics in the blue humanities, food studies, world-ecology, and disaster studies.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will develop a critical understanding of different nodes of debates in the environmental humanities.
• Students will develop an advanced understanding of a range of different concepts and methodologies deployed in the environmental humanities.

Subject-specific Skills:

• An advanced ability to engage critically with cultural texts, artefacts and debates relating to environmental issues, employing critical frameworks and perspectives learned on the module.
• An advanced ability to engage critically with different forms of analysis in the environmental humanities informed by critical theory and cultural studies.
• An advanced ability to work in an interdisciplinary way, combining approaches and critical methods from different disciplines.

Key Skills:

• Effective oral and written communication tailored for different audiences.
• Independent research skills, using a wide range of search tools and sources from different disciplines.
• An advanced ability to synthesise complex material from a wide range of sources in order to produce effective written documents.
• Competence in appropriate information technology skills.
• Ability to demonstrate professional conduct through observation of professional and academic standards, including correct editorial referencing of sources.
• Problem-solving skills.
• Organisational skills, including time management.

• The seminars supply a framework of information and interpretation, which gives students an overview of a subject and a point of departure for their work, introducing subject-specific knowledge and demonstrating the use of subject-specific skills. They also enable students to develop through discussion their own critical understanding of debates and methodologies.
• In addition to preparation and reading for assignments, students will be required to prepare for each seminar by set reading and questions, and to play an active role in discussing issues that arise.
• The presentation gives students an opportunity to present the results of their work, and, in dialogue with one another and with staff, to evaluate these results, promoting the development of subject-specific and key skills.
• The writing for a non-academic audience and the essay require students to investigate particular topics, to present the results of their investigations in a clear and concise manner, and to cite their sources fully, accurately, and consistently, assessing subject-specific knowledge, subject-specific skills, and key skills. The piece of non-academic writing is to be addressed to a general audience and written in accessible style; it should engage with a pressing topic from a perspective informed by the debates/frameworks studied on this module.
• The essay is an academic piece of writing on a topic agreed with the module convenor; while students will be expected to relate to and work with current thinking within the environmental humanities, this assignment can offer an engaged perspective on specific current environmental struggles.
• The opportunity to receive individual feedback on formative and summative assessments will also be arranged.

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