Environmental Humanities
The Winter 2019 STE on Environmental Humanities was co-led by Allison Carruth and Ursula K. Heise. The seminar was designed to generate the intellectual substance, learning outcomes, core courses, and pedagogical strategies for the creation of Environmental Humanities majors at UCLA and other colleges in the Los Angeles area. Faculty and graduate student participants enhanced the already existing, vibrant community of scholars in this multidisciplinary field at UCLA and Los Angeles community colleges and collaboratively explored core concepts, methods, and materials for designing such majors. What concepts and texts should form the core of an Environmental Humanities major? What learning outcomes and careers does such a major prepare students for, and how would these outcomes be achieved and evaluated? What would a course curriculum for the major look like, and what incentives and support would enable faculty at different institutions to contribute to this curriculum? How would field work, community engagement projects and service learning be integrated into the curriculum? How should the new major be administered, and how will it negotiate existing departmental and divisional boundaries, especially between the Humanities and Social Sciences? With the help of a core reading list of foundational texts that have helped to define the Environmental Humanities as a field, the seminar investigated these questions with the goal of finalizing a major proposal by the end of the term.