Topics in Environmental Humanities

Environmental storytelling and narrative

This course will explore the centrality of storytelling and diverse narrative practices in the environmental humanities, not only as tools of communication that promote understanding of complex environmental processes and capture ecological imagination, but also as catalysts to emotion and pathways to civic engagement. Students will examine how several central areas of inquiry within EH research theorize and engage with narration, both broadly across the international field as well as more locally in the Nordic region (including collaborations with the cultural institutions in Trondheim).

The course will investigate the articulation across narrative media forms of environmental humanities research topics that may include resource extraction, petrocultures, blue humanities, haunting, solastalgia, mourning, irony, and affect. In addition to theoretical and thematic engagement with environmental storytelling, this course will have a practical hands-on component and a special focus on public dissemination and cooperation with community partners. The students will learn how to collaboratively develop an outward-facing public engagement output.

The course is held as part of the Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH).

Skills:

Students who finish the course will have the following skills:

- ability to perform close analysis of film, television, literary, and intermedial texts

- ability to plan and execute public engagement efforts

- ability to engage in critical reflection on public environmental humanities

Knowledge:

Students who finish the course will have greater knowledge of:

- critical approaches to narrative and storytelling in the context of environmental humanities research

- critical paradigms within environmental humanities

- the use of intermedial storytelling in public engagement and dissemination

- 35 hours of participation in lectures, workshops, seminars, field trips, and group activities during the 5 days - Self-studies / reading: 300 pages syllabus - One five-minute presentation during the course - Compulsory assignment