The Environmental Humanities Working Group draws on the breadth of knowledge and expertise of its members, together with its convening power, to debate and analyse the current landscape, and produce a report and a series of recommendations for decision-makers.
The Current Landscape
The environmental humanities is now a huge cross-disciplinary area of study. Much recent work in the field is founded on the assumption that arts and humanities approaches need to play a central role in our responses to climate change.
The problems we face cannot be solved purely through scientific solutions: we urgently need a new understanding of the cultural and historical developments that have produced our current situation, and new imaginative resources for dealing with it in the future.
There is a growing consensus across many fields, including environmental debates, STEM subjects and quantitative social sciences, that the Arts and Humanities constitute a critical dimension in effective policy formation and implementation. As Anthropologist Peter Sutoris wrote in The Guardian in May 2021: Climate change ‘is a crisis of culture and politics, not of science and technology’. Indeed, policies which do not recognise or embrace the importance of communication, imagination, learned lessons, human creativity, narratives, history, ethics, understanding and collaborative action will almost certainly struggle to bring about the change and benefits for which they were designed.
Scholars of history, philosophy, religious studies, literature, film and media studies are exploring many aspects of humans’ relationship with climate and the environment, both in the past and the present. There is a huge volume of exciting new work by creative practitioners across Scotland engaging with the environmental crisis. What is clear from current and ongoing projects is that there is a host of research questions emanating from the Arts and Humanities that will have a direct and profound impact on the effectiveness and sustainability of our attempts to combat and respond to climate change in the future.
Remits
Membership (under further recruitment)
The Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance involves members from across the full spectrum of Higher Education in Scotland.
- Professor Jason König, University of St Andrews, Chair of the Working Group
- Dr Michelle Bastian, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
- Professor Graham Jeffery, University of the West of Scotland
- Professor Catherine O’Leary, SAHA co-Chair
- Dr Charles Pigott, University of Strathclyde
- F.R. Simone, SAHA Policy and Communications Officer (secretariat)
If you have any suggestions or ideas you would like to share with the working group, please use the form in the contact tab (here) or email the SAHA Policy and Communications Officer at fsimone@therse.org.uk
