Digital Week Three: Environmental Humanities

The third week of TORCH Goes Digital focused on the theme "Environmental Humanities". Through a curated series of articles, blog posts, podcasts, poems and more, we delved into issues of queer ecology, and how human activity (historical, contemporary, and imagined) shapes the world around us. We examined how tracing such activity contribute to a deeper understanding of the environment and questioned what historical, scientific, aesthetic, or fictive modes of investigation reveal about our relationship with the ‘natural’ world.

Popular content included bite-sized talks from the Ashmolean After Hours: Carpe Diem! event, part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, including Supping and Sacrificing in Pompeii's Gardens. Janet Dunkelbarger presents on the archaeological evidence of garden dining spaces in Pompeii’s houses, restaurants, and tombs reveals complexities of both Roman dining practices and the meaning of the Roman garden.

We also enjoyed the People's Landscapes: Beyond the Green and Pleasant Land lecture series, convened by the University of Oxford's National Trust Partnership. This series brought together experts and commentators from a range of institutions, professions and academic disciplines to explore people's engagement with and impact upon land and landscape in the past, present and future.

Created in partnership with the University of Oxford, Trusted Source is a growing collection of short and easily understood articles about history, culture and the natural environment, written by academics and National Trust experts. We enjoyed a selection of articles from this series, including Why was Lancelot 'Capability' Brown so important? by our own Dr Oliver Cox.

In this brilliant talk, researchers on Caribbean literature from the TORCH Race and Resistance Programme, the Fiction and Human Rights Network, and the Bodleian Library reflected on the 2016 Bodleian Volcanoes exhibition. They also explored more broadly how the theme of natural disaster narratives and the environment shaped other aspects of Caribbean literature.

We also enjoyed various presentations from the event ‘The Oxford Dodo: Culture at the Crossroads’, celebrating the life and legacy of the famous creature in collaboration between the Museum of Natural History and TORCH. The event was part of Being Human 2015, the UK's national festival of the humanities. Such presentations included The Dodo, Animal Icons and De-Extinction by Dr Paul Jepson.

Our Futures Thinking Network also provided us with some fascinating food for thought, including the discussion A Labour Economist Reads Climate Fiction wherein Dr Otto Kässi shares his love of the work of climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and wonders about whether we have the political policies and strength to manage impending crises.

TORCH was delighted to announce a poetry competition for #TORCHGoesDigital! The prompt was “Environmental Humanities” and we were amazed to receive over 70 entries. We will be announcing the winners soon.

Finally, we had our very first livestreamed Big Tent, Big Ideas Event: Could you be arrested for planting flowers in your street? What guerrilla gardening reveals about our relationship with urban nature & culture. Author JC Niala joined Dr Elizabeth Ewart to discuss human beings’ relationship to nature in cities. Working with the case study of guerrilla gardeners who operate in cities such as London and Oxford they explored the interactions between different types of gardeners that challenge commonly held assumptions about nature & culture.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/RadtSYOaYyg