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The
Environment
STAR
(Scotland's Transatlantic Relations)
The
Science of Man
Scots
at War
The
Environment
IASH's interdisciplinary
research in the Humanities and the Environment examines degrees of symbiosis
and interdependence between the mental and the physical, seeking to re-envision
and redefine our understandings of humans in the world with a view to
changing human practice.
Embodied
Values
'Embodied
Values: Bringing the Senses back to the Environment', a John E. Sawyer Seminar, funded by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation . A series of workshops are addressing in turn
the senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell from various disciplinary
perspectives to deliver humanities perspectives on environmental models
of the senses and what constitutes the haptic. The Sawyer Seminar will conclude with an international conference in December 2011.
Each of the six workshops includes a public lecture, as well as a day-long seminar with invited participants and an experiential session. The speakers in the public lectures have been:
Professor Paul Carter, Deakin University, Australia: An Auditorium for Echoes: inventing sound places and the ethics of recollection (Hearing/Sound)
David Rothenberg, New Jersey Institute of Technology, gave an evening concert in which he played jazz saxophone alongside digitally modified bird and whale sounds (bird sound was slowed down and whale song speeded up). Rothenberg worked closely with deep ecology originator and supporter, Arne Naess. (Hearing/Sound)
Professor David Howes, Concordia University, Montreal: Smellscapes: The Role of Odour in the Constitution of Selves and Environments (Scenting/Smell)
Professor Kate Soper, London Metropolitan University: Seeing is Caring? Aesthetic Perception, Environmental Concern and Cultural Renewal (Seeing/Sight)
Professor Steven Connor writer, critic and broadcaster; Academic Director of the London Consortium: Intact (Touching/Touch)
Further details can be found on the Sawyer Seminar project website
An earlier series of workshops,
'Embodied Values and the Environment ', (http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/embodied.values.html)
funded by the British Academy, explored ways in which humans, non-humans,
and their environments merge and transform each other, looking particularly
at ways in which attitudes, values and actions shape, and are in turn
shaped by, the environments we inhabit. Certain themes therefore recur in different disciplinary contexts: relationality, fluidity, boundaries and identities, embeddedness and enfolding, non-linguistic communication, human-nature divide (or lack thereof), animate-inanimate distinction ...
Current core members:
Pauline Phemister (University of Edinburgh) philosophy, metaphysics of nature, developing pluralist, relational environmental metaphysics
Wendy Wheeler (London Met) English Literature, working on biocommunication drawing on biosemiotic theory of Peirce and Bateson.
Tim Collins and Reiko Goto (Robert Gordons) Environmental artists, developing theory and practice surrounding human-non-human empathic relations
Tom Bristow (University of New England, New South Wales). English Literature. Working Heideggerian embeddedness, ecopoetics and particularly Foer’s Eating Animals (vegetarianism, human –animal divide, ingestion of the other, literally and metaphorically)
Alex Guilherme (IASH, Edinburgh): Philosophy. Researching I-Thou relations in environmental context (Buber) and the educational value of dialogue (Buber)
Jonathan Delafield Butt (currently CRF/RSE Fellow at IASH) biochemist, philosopher, looking at cell communication, fluidity and at the animate-inanimate distinction.
Recent events:
October 2010: workshop with Laura Doyle (Professor of English, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Visiting Leverhulme Fellow, University of Exeter)
Papers distributed and read in advance of the workshop:
- Laura Doyle: Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism
- Michael Northcott: Embodying Climate Change
- Tom Bristow: Towards Interdisciplinary Environmental Criticism
- Pauline Phemister: Relational Space and Places of Value
For further information
on the Embodied Values Project, please visit the EV website (http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/nature)
The
Humanities and Climate Change Group
A
series of lunchtime talks, held at IASH, 2 Hope Park Square, at 1 p.m.
All welcome.
Spring
2011 programme:
Friday,
11 February
Rachel Howell (Postgraduate, Centre for the Study of Environmental Change
and Sustainability): "Lights, camera...action? The impact of the
climate change film The Age of Stupid"
Monday,
21 February
Professor Lorraine Code (Philosophy, York University, Canada): "Thinking
Ecologically after Rachel Carson"
Friday,
11 March
Dr. Fabienne Collignon (Postdoctoral Fellow of IASH): "Sci-Fi-Tech"
Abstract: In the era of climate change, the promise of
green power to counteract or curb scenarios of disaster produces landscapes
whose mechanisms seem designed to ward off catastrophe. This paper proposes
to analyse wind turbine technology in terms of its links to science fiction,
and seeks to insert the machines into narratives of the sublime, both
natural and technological, that take into account the rhetoric of machine
aesthetics and the desire of a return to 'nature'. There remains, as such,
an ambivalence about wind turbines: as concrete realisations of a techno-cultural
aesthetic, the aerodynamic turbines function as vehicles destined to attain
a cleaner future - Vorsprung durch Technik - while they simultaneously
seem to operate as time capsules travelling back into the past. Implanted
in the landscape, their forms, invested with the potential to restore
the planet or territorial enclaves to former beauty, are also, however,
considered to be threatening, another example of a ravenous, disfiguring
technology that upsets the delicate balance of the environment; they are
the Martian invaders, expressions of global, hostile plots looming over
local communities. This paper is, consequently, interested in exploring
geographies of power, the contradicting aspects of technocratic approaches
to sustainability, and specifically of wind turbines, their occupation
in, and transformation of, the landscape. Research questions focus on
the curious schizophrenia of turbine design, on their precarious position
as engines of the future - dynamic, aestheticised, and often also biologised,
compared to birds, or outsized plants - and as monuments to an idealised
past; the origin of these vast, monochromatic structures, earthly or extraterrestrial,
prelapsarian or post-apocalyptic, is never quite clear.
Monday,
4 April
Professor Jeffrey McCarthy (English and Environmental Studies, Westminster
College, Utah; Visiting Fellow of IASH): "Mountain Climbing and Environmental
Thinking"
If you would like to be
added to the mailing list for this group, please email iash@ed.ac.uk
Previous speakers:
11 June 2010: Dr. Alexandre
Guilherme (Philosophy, University of Durham): "Climate change and the
ethics of ‘care’".
25 August 2010: Professor
Timothy Collins (environmental art researcher, theorist, teacher and practitioner):
"TREES are the largest LIVING things on earth..."
26 November 2010: Dr. Emma
Dummett (Architecture, University of Edinburgh): "The simple life from
the grassroots: down-shifting and the Big Society"
To join the mailing list
for this Group, email iash@ed.ac.uk
Theory and
Practice Seminars: 'Thinking Animals' (Autumn 2009)
A series of lectures exploring the human-animal divide (if there is one), animal rationality and animal emotion (and the scientific quantification of these).
Mr John Llewelyn (former Reader in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh): On Derrida's alleged Dogmatism regarding the Human and the Animal
Dr Jane Goldman (Reader in English Literature, University of Glasgow): 'When dogs will become men': canine allegory, theriocephalous figuration, and the modernist melancholia of Virginia Woolf
Dr. John Miller (Postdoctoral Fellow of IASH): Hygiene, Visuality and the Victorian Gorilla
Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder (Reader in Qualitative Science and Animal Welfare, Scottish Agricultural College, University of Edinburgh): What is it like to be a pig in a cage? Assessing the quality of animal experience
Dr Wendy Wheeler (Reader in English, London Metropolitan University): Captivation: Biosemiotics, Animal and Human Mind and the Question of Abduction
For abstracts of the papers, click here.
'Landscape-Mindscape:
Contemporary Scottish Literature'
An Interdisciplinary Colloquium, University of Edinburgh, 24-25 June 2010
The colloquium examined Scottish literature post-1998 with an emphasis
on cultural construction and reception. As a means to emphasize models
of ecosocial relationships, the sense of environment as process, and ethical
frameworks including human accountability to the environment, scholars
were asked to consider the interrelation between mental ecology and physical
ecology but also to clarify any meaningful interfaces with history and
geography that their texts propose.
Click here
for further details and programme
Thursday, 29 September, 4.00 - 6.00 pm,
IASH, Hope Park Square
Lecture by Professor David Wood (Vanderbilt University):
Is it Time for Art?
Abstract: "Does art still matter, or is it, in terms of any real significance, as Hegel said, 'a thing of the past'?
I argue that the major challenges of our time are tied up with the aporias of representation that art is especially
equipped to help us think through."
David Wood is W.Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Professor of European Studies, and Professor of Art at
Vanderbilt University. His interests include contemporary continental philosophy and nineteenth century German thought, Heidegger, and the philosophy of nature. He is also an environmental artist and stages Art Events from time to time.
TREE session - 21 February 2011: an innovative session, organised by Drs. John Harries and Rachel Harkness, taking a practical local example as the basis for more abstract theorising.
Carbon Conversations
IASH, Spring 2011, Mondays 4-6 pm.
A discussion group, facilitated by theTransition Edinburgh University group, looking at how climate change affects us. One of the Guardian's 'Top 20 Solutions to Climate Change', this course is billed as a great way to build knowledge and capacity for a low-carbon future and develop as a team. Developed by Cambridge University, the course book covers topics such as food, travel, and home energy.
The Transition movement is interested in helping the shift in everyday practices and ways of living that comes with moving from society's oil dependency to (hopefully!) something much greener and socially just. As Rachel Howell (sociologist) pointed out in her Humanities and Climate Change talk, one of the most effective ways of sustaining carbon reducing behaviour change is through small focused supportive groups – such as those formed through the Carbon Conversations. Participants commit to 5-6 meetings and to looking closely at their own carbon footprints, with practical advice and help in making further reductions.
Atmospheres and Atmospherics theme
For information on this IASH research theme see http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/themes.atmospheres.html
Scotland's
Transatlantic Relations (STAR)
The STAR Project continues to provide a locus for transatlantic research
with a Scottish dimension; and through a variety of seminars, conferences,
publication ventures and other collaborations, it continues to provide
texture for ongoing debates concerning transatlantic theory in practice.
Further information is available on the STAR website (http://www.star.ac.uk)
The
Science of Man
At the beginning of his
famous Treatise of Human Nature the philosopher David Hume declared, boldly,
that "'[t]is evident that all the sciences have a relation, greater or
less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run
from it, they still return back by one passage or another." This "Science
of Man", as Hume described it (women were comprehended in his term), involved
the study of human life in all its various aspects. Built on the empirical
methods of inquiry that underpinned the Enlightenment, it was expected
to provide the key to understanding central questions of human existence,
from personal identity to the foundations of morality and of civil society,
to the long-term patterns underlying the historical evolution of human
culture, manners, and government. Not only Hume, but many other Scottish
theorists - Adam Smith, John Millar, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart,
to name only a few - committed themselves to formulating an overarching
science which became one of the central and distinctive intellectual concerns
of the Scottish Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The belief that questions
about morality, society, and history could be addressed by an empirical
analysis of human nature was not self-evident, whatever Hume might claim.
The aim of our research project on the "Science of Man" has been to reconstruct
the grounds on which these writers argued that this science was so important,
and to investigate what it actually involved, in terms of the methods
and paradigms that they developed, and which contributed to establish
a new range of disciplines in the human sciences, from psychology and
sociology to anthropology. To this end, we assembled a "primary group"
of experts from around the world: philosophers, historians, literary scholars,
linguists, social scientists and historians of science, whose common point
of interest was the Scottish Enlightenment.
Detailed information is
published on the project website: http://www.scienceofman.ed.ac.uk/
Scots
at War
This project was located
in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities from 1995-1999
and is funded by the Scots at War Trust.
The aim of the project is
to research and collate information about Scots who served in the armed
and civilian services in the 20th century. It is based on an internet
Website which quickly attracted
an average of 1000 worldwide users per month. The research and Website
publication is augmented by seminars involving veterans, scholars and
students. Subjects have included The Royal Navy, The 51st Highland Division,
Prisoners of War in South East Asia, Indian Army Scots, The Secret War,
The Sergeants Mess and The Women's Land Army.
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