Visting Professor Stefania Gallini

Stefania Gallini, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

History Department

Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Bogotá

 

Proposal of teaching activities

 

Digital Environmental Humanities: challenges and convergences

Seminar to be taught in English. December 2010 - January 2021

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia


 

Digital Environmental Humanities is one of the most recent entries in the new taxonomy of knowledge. It merges two interdisciplinary fields of flourishing, albeit geographically uneven scholarship in the last decades: Digital Humanities (DH) and Environmental Humanities (EH). The former refers to the realm where Humanities and Social Sciences encounter the digital culture. The latter has been defined as the conjunction across a range of research areas: environmental history, environmental philosophy, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, cultural geography, political ecology. Both fields promote experimental pedagogies in their teaching activities, are public-oriented and practice-centered, although also struggling to gain theoretical ground. Much more common in the Anglo-saxon and Northern European academic milieus rather than in Southern Europe or Latin America, Digital Environmental Humanities is an innovative perspective to tackle the Anthropocene and the understanding of the environmental crisis from a critical, decolonizing and politically engaged perspective. 

The seminar is aimed at introducing to the field as done in different areas of the world notwithstanding its explicit phrasing. It addresses students enrolled in the Doctorate on Humanities and the Master in Public History, but will hopefully appeal to a larger audience interested in society-nature relations and how digital culture is mediating its knowledge and representation. 

The geographical focus is the globe, but the seminar draws from my expertise in Latin American Environmental History and my own engagement with international environmental history community for the last 15 years. 

 

Pedagogically, the seminar follows the recent trend in university teaching that emphasizes student-centered learning and education “beyond the classroom” through public-oriented projects.

 

Topics:

  • Digital Humanities: current international agenda and geopolitics

  • Environmental Humanities: seeking for a canon and resisting it

  • Spatial history, digital cartography and environmental conflicts

  • Critical digital archive thinking and environmental history: the case of the Colombian armed conflict and the #ArchivosDeLaVerdad

  • Storytelling of nature and society: representing nature in the web

  • Citizen environmental sciences and public historians 

 

References:

  •  Posthumus, Stephanie, Stéfan Sinclair, and Veronica Poplawski. “Digital and Environmental Humanities: Strong Networks, Innovative Tools, Interactive Objects.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 5, no. 2 (June 29, 2018): 156–71. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/698345.

  • Sinclair, Stéfan, and Stephanie Posthumus. “Digital? Environmental: Humanities.” In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 369–79. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016.

  • “DEH: Digital Environmental Humanities | Environment & Society Portal.” Rachel Carson Center, Munich http://www.environmentandsociety.org/mml/deh-digital-environmental-humanities.

  • Iovino, Serenella, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past, eds. Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. University of Virginia Press, 2018.

  • Castree, Noel. “The Anthropocene and the Environmental Humanities: Extending the Conversation.” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 233–60. 

https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615496



 

Detailed content

 

December, Thur. 3 h. 9.00-12.00

  1. Digital and Environmental Humanities: how Humanities came under pressure. (Introductory session)

December, Thur. 10 h. 9.00-12.00

  1. Digital archives and critical archival thinking

December, Wed. 16 h. 9.00-12.00

  1. Multi and transmedia formats of academic communication: 

  2. Audio: podcast  

  3. Video: videoabstract (see https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/video-abstracts/)

  4. Visual: academic poster : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RwJbhkCA58

  5. Social media: Tweeting conferences

  6. Hybrid editing: beyond ebooks

January, Thur. 7 h. 9.00-12.00

  1. How to get away with keywords: classification, metadata, and semantic web

January, Thur. 14 h. 9.00-12.00

  1. Crowdsourced science: public historian, citizen archivist, and collaborative archives.

January, Thur. 21 h. 9.00-12.0

  1. Mapping in the Humanities: spatial history, GeoHumanities and environmental conflicts