'The Environmental Humanities'(2012) via filmmaker/video artist Peter Norrman and collaborators

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I’ve been delighted to have been recently asked to be a contributor on the US/international ecomediastudies.org website. The website has a excellent resource page of key academic books and references and really useful, it has a page dedicated to journal calls for papers, conferences.

‘The Ecomedia Studies community seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to the study of non-print media as it applies to environmental discourse and action’.

On the site recently was the above video which I found really useful, particularly as a means to put faces to some of the people whose books I’ve read. For those interested, (note the video is 40 min. long), the people interviewed in the video discuss the relatively recent intersection of the environment and the humanities. It is quite an engaging documentary as amongst the interviews it includes virtual video and photo essay installations.

Featured in the video is Ursula Heise, former president of the American Society for Literature and the Environment (ASLE)  along with Greg Gerrard, author of the book Ecocriticism. This video was presented at the most recent ASLE conference. It’s interesting to note that ecocritical thinking is developed in the literary theory area, as opposed to other art forms, over the last 10-15 years.

The video was created by another interesting network -The Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, a research network for environmentally oriented studies based primarily in the humanities.

The Nordic network consists of researchers whose work addresses environmental questions from numerous disciplinary angles; the fields of history, literature, ethnology, linguistics, landscape architecture and cultural studies are represented among the 50+ researchers now affiliated with NIES. Whil the network is strongly anchored in the Nordic countries, institutional affiliation in the Nordic region is not a prerequisite to membership. The network’s spheres of interest, broadly speaking, include focuses on environmental integrity, stability and sustainability as illumined at the intersection of culture and nature.