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A case study in citizen environmental humanities: creating a participatory plant story website

“…Environmental humanities work, alongside environmental studies, animal studies, and multispecies ethnography, has deepened and continues to deepen our conceptualizations of this "more-than-human" world, challenging as it does not simply the exceptionalism of humans but also the exceptionalism of "human" as a category independent of other organisms and beings. 5 Here, the legacies of gender studies and specifically feminist science and technology studies are clearly evident, and many forebears of environmental humanities include feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway (2003), Val Plumwood (1993, Deborah Bird Rose (1992Rose ( , 2004, Londa Schiebinger (1989Schiebinger ( , 1993, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015), and others. Indeed, shifting the focus away from humans and toward plants has been a key premise of the Herbaria 3.0 project from the beginning.…”

“…A foundational tenet of environmental humanities is that no single academic discipline is on its own enough to address or begin to solve our environmental crises. While the field collects under one umbrella a number of existing disciplinary subjects (literature, philosophy, history, political science, anthropology, sociology, geography, fine arts, gender studies) that deal with addressing environmental concepts, problems, or implications in qualitative ways (Rose et al 2012 ), mere disciplinary “collection” cannot do or be enough to meet the environmental problems our societies face, enmeshed as they are in political, social, cultural, economic, historical, medical, and other systems. Our site recognizes this imbrication in two ways: theoretically, by bringing together project participants whose scholarship, teaching, and public practice are informed by a wide range of environmentally oriented research, and materially, by curating each story submission, adding relevant historical, political, social, cultural, and other contexts to the plant story.…”

“…A second, related tenet of environmental humanities, shared with environmental studies, is that nature and culture have always-already been enmeshed in one another, that these are not exclusive or objective concepts that can ever be understood without one another (Emmett and Nye 2017 ; Rose et al 2012 ; Plumwood 2002 ). This point is perhaps the most significant for environmental humanities because the disciplines that make it up have for most of their disciplinary histories foregrounded human interests at the expense of nonhuman others.…”

Dear departed: Writing the lifeworlds of place

“…Optimistic accounts of change-in-place also exist. The possibilities of renewing a relationship with place during phases of significant social upheaval, ecological disruption or as part of broader cultural shifts recall appeals made for a politics of place characterised by an outward-facing attitude and an acknowledgement of the "simultaneity of stories-so-far" (Massey, 2005, p. 9), and also speak to the kinds of conjunctive, inconclusive approaches favoured in the emergent environmental humanities (Bird Rose et al, 2012). When a sense of place is turned inside out, rather than folded in on itself, emotional geographies can be forged through extended solidarities and allegiances.…”