Cultures, Ecologies, Ethics: A Field Guide to Environmental Humanities

This is to invite members of Sustainable Living Armidale to a forthcoming talk by Kate Rigby, Professor of Environmental Humanities at Monash University. Kate’s talk is titled: “Cultures, Ecologies, Ethics: A Field Guide to Environmental Humanities”.

The talk is scheduled for Wednesday, 5th November in A2 Lecture Theatre in the Arts building at UNE. We will commence with drinks and nibbles at 5pm with the talk beginning at 5.30pm.

Here is some information about Kate and her talk:How might German Studies enhance our understanding of global warming? What can philosophers tells us about declining fisheries? Or historians about habitat loss? Poets about pollution?

In an era that has been dubbed the Anthropocene, when  human activities have become a key determinant for the future of all life on Earth, transforming the very geology of the planet for millennia to come, it is crucial that researchers and teachers in the humanities should join with their colleagues in the physical and social sciences in developing and propagating the new kinds of knowledge that are necessary for engendering more just and sustainable outcomes, locally, nationally, regionally, and globally.

In this public lecture, Professor Kate Rigby (herself a Germanist by training) provides a field guide to the burgeoning new research area of the Environmental Humanities. Highlighting the pivotal role of Australian writers and scholars in the emergence of this multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field of inquiry, the lecture will home in on three sites of particularly lively current international research activity: environmental justice studies; multi-species studies; and disaster studies.

Kate Rigby, from Monash University’s School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, is Australia’s first Professor of Environmental Humanities. A Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, she was the Founding President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia-New Zealand). Currently, Prof. Rigby is also the inaugural Director of the Australia-Pacific Forum on Religion and Ecology, and a board member of the Humanities for the Environment Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory (http://hfemellon.com.au/). Her research ranges across German Studies, European philosophy, literature and religion, and culture and ecology. She is a founding Senior Editor of the journal Philosophy Activism Nature, and her books include Gender, Ecology and the Sacred (co-edited, 1999), Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004), Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (co-edited, 2011) and Dancing with Disaster: Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (forthcoming, 2015).

I have a nice poster for the talk if you would like to use it, but am not sure how to upload this or send it to you.

I do hope you can come to what will be a very interesting and important presentation.

Regards,

By: Louise Noble