Individualized Program (INDI) in Environmental Humanities
Concordia University
Description
From global climate change and mass extinctions to the pesticides and microplastics in our bodies, the changing environment has become the vital concern of our times. While environmental issues are often viewed as problems for environmental scientists and policy experts, these fields are entangled with the historically and culturally varied ways in which humans have represented, interacted with, and produced the “natural” world. The Environmental Humanities draws on a range of disciplines—including environmental history, ecocriticism, ecomedia, science and technology studies, cultural geography, gender studies, race studies, and Indigenous studies—in the effort to understand how contested histories and representations of the environment shape our perceptions of energy extraction, climate change, food systems, environmental injustice, and the web of life.
At Concordia, Environmental Humanities research comprises a range of interdisciplinary topics, including postcolonial ecologies to Early American perspectives on climate change, African conceptions of animality, the philosophical problems posed by nuclear waste, the role of smell in environmental justice narratives, late nineteenth-century constructions of "nature" in the tropics, and sustainable urban landscape design. For potential PhD students, Concordia’s interdisciplinary doctoral programs offer the possibility of devising a research program that spans the humanities and other modes of knowledge production, such as biology, climate science, anthropology, Indigenous studies, and research creation.