The First Fridays Postgraduate Workshop, On Methods, Practices and Urgencies in the Environmental Humanities: Research in a time of Climate Crisis with Emily Potter and Jennifer Hamilton was held on 1 November 2019 at Deakin Downtown.
About the Workshop
This workshop will take the form of a dialogue between Dr Jennifer Hamilton (University of New England) and Dr Emily Potter (Deakin), in an attempt to model the kind of collaborative scholarly practices that we suggest are more responsive to – and necessary for – a time of climate crisis. From the perspective of the broad environmental humanities, and literary studies more specifically, Jennifer and Emily will open up discussion around new and emerging methods that are challenging conventional ways of thinking, reading, writing and making, and invite an ideas exchange around the potential of – as Jennifer and her collaborator Astrida Neimanis write – ‘composting’ our intellectual histories, with an eye to the intersections of feminism and the environmental humanities. Jennifer and Emily will also speak to current projects, the ‘Composting Feminisms’ series and The Shadow Places Network, as exemplar attempts to do scholarship differently.
Recommended Readings
- Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis, ‘Compositing Feminisms and Environmental Humanities’, Environmental Humanities 10.2 (2018)
- The Shadow Places Network, ‘A Manifesto for Shadow Places’,https://www.shadowplaces.net/manifesto
About the Speakers
Jennifer Hamilton is a lecturer in Literary Studies at the University of New England on Anaiwan Country. In 2015 she co-founded Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities reading group with Astrida Neimanis; the group meets bi-monthly in Sydney and online. Her research moves between literary history, feminist theory and environmental humanities. The Community Weathering Station (CoWS) is her current focus. This collaborative project is tracking individual domestic-scaled adaptations to environmental change and mapping them at a community scale. It is responding to the unprecedented drought in Arimdale.
Emily Potter researches across the fields of literary studies, environmental practice, and place-making. Her books include Plastic Water: The social and material life of bottled water (2015, MIT Press, with Gay Hawkins and Kane Race) and Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the field on settler-colonial place (2019, Intellect/University of Chicago Press). Since 2017, she has co-convened The Shadow Places Network. She is Associate Head of School (Research) and senior lecturer in Literary Studies at Deakin University.
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For more information about the ‘First Fridays’ Deakin Gender and Sexuality Studies HDR Masterclass and Seminar series.
