We live in a world of transformed environments, and as environmental transformation continues at a rapid pace, new ways of thinking about these transformations have never been as important as they are now. In a broad sense, traditional disciplinary approaches have at times been inadequate for framing the social and ecological complexities that factor into our uncertain environmental worlds due to rigid scholarly boundaries that continue to compartmentalize research. Although still emerging, environmental humanities research has tried to create links across these scholarly boundaries and has attempted to dissolve separations between academia and society. These reorientations have created new and truly exciting learning and thinking arrangements that have begun to reframe how we understand environments, their social and ecological complexities and histories, as well as concerns over crisis, urgency and future possibility. In addition, these new learning and thinking arrangements have begun to challenge dominant environmental narratives and offer up alternatives that can allow for agency toward transformative change. By reorienting the way we learn, educate and engage with knowledge in a collaborative way, the environmental humanities as a whole has inspired and facilitated novel conversations that have led to truly transformative work.
We encourage you to read more about the importance of the environmental humanities via the new, shared environmental missions of the faculties and departments of humanities at Danish universities.
As stated in the mission document, the ongoing contributions of the environmental humanities include:
CEH’s work aligns with these missions.
At Aarhus University’s Center for Environmental Humanities, our mission is to promote and foster ongoing research projects and activities at AU within the diverse field of environmental humanities, while also linking to environmental humanities research rinternationally. What makes CEH unique is our dedication to generating a diverse community of scholars, students, practitioners and experts by fostering plurality in how we learn, think and engage with important and pressing environmental questions and concerns. At CEH we seek to create a space that begins with bottom-up learning in order to build worthwhile projects that address the continually transforming worlds and environments we inhabit. We seek to build a broad network of scholars, students, and others, who are committed to exploring what the humanities can contribute to conversations about pressing environmental issues, socio-environmental change, and ecological transformation.
To help signify the plurality of perspectives needed for addressing any one of these themes, we have informally started using “environmental humanities+” to help signify how the center reaches beyond humanities disciplines and engages with other fields. Our excitement for working across these boundaries starts from recognizing the limitations of any one approach in understanding how life is entangled and unfolds, and how worlds are made.
One of the CEH’s central goals is to foster interdisciplinary collaborations not only among humanities scholars, but also between the humanities and other fields in the social sciences, natural sciences, and in artistic practice.
Core CEH members and affiliated CEH researchers both embody and shape the center’s goals, mission and institutional function in a diversity of ways as they enact their work. Some focus on ethics, language, and perception, drawing on frameworks from fields such as philosophy, literature, and media studies. Others engage in empirical investigations of institutions and landscapes, inspired by approaches from anthropology, archaeology and history.
All are welcome to participate in CEH events and activities and we readily welcome guest scholars. In addition, we welcome visiting scholars from all backgrounds and disciplines who would like to spend time with us and our vibrant community.
While CEH is a research center, it also sees environmental scholarship as intimately bound up in, and necessarily connected to, other worlds within and beyond the university. We thus welcome members of the public to any of our events, activities and discussions, and we would be delighted for anyone outside of a university setting to make contact with us to learn more about and get involved with CEH. In addition, we also see education and research as inseparable, and we thus support an expansion of environmental humanities teaching, as well as the active participation of university students (BA, MA, and PhD) in CEH events, activities and discussions.
CEH is housed within the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC), a part of Aarhus University’s School for Culture and Society (CAS). It receives administrative and financial support from CAS, AU Faculty of Arts, and external grants. The center began formally in 2016, emerging out of several earlier AU research projects, including Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) and C3Net.
