Mission Statement
The Environmental Humanities Working Group at Binghamton University is an interdisciplinary program made up of faculty and graduate students that explores the complex relationships between humans and the environment through the lens of the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Its recurring meetings as well as colloquia and other events encourage generative discussion about environmental issues from historical, philosophical, cultural, aesthetic, and ethical perspectives, complementing scientific approaches to environmental studies. Members engage with a diverse range of texts, ideas, and cultural practices that shape our understanding of nature, ecology, and environmental challenges. The program emphasizes the importance of narrative, ethics, and cultural analysis in addressing contemporary environmental issues. By combining methodologies from disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, and other humanistic fields, the group’s primary aim is to seek out new ways of thinking holistically about environmental challenges and to communicate effectively about these issues in various professional and academic contexts.
Our interest in collaborating with researchers, teachers, and writers from within and beyond the BU campus community stems from our conviction about the urgent public need for broad conversation amongst various effective environmental leaders and communicators who can address the ethical and cultural issues that complement the technical expertise provided by STEM and other techno-political frameworks. The humanities disciplines foster deep critical thinking about the underlying cultural and economic roots of the environmental crisis, providing an epistemic toolkit for understanding the particular ideologies that have informed human action and behavior and for considering how that behavior has contributed to the phenomena of climate change that the scientific disciplines have so extensively mapped.
With respect to the group’s pedagogical commitments, this interdisciplinary approach provides a holistic, comprehensive framework for thought that trains students to connect research with actual, lived communities. In terms of career preparation, a grounding in the Environmental Humanities opens doors to careers in policy, law, education, communication, and advocacy that include fields like corporate sustainability, environmental restoration planning, and environmental protection.
The EHWG is fond of summarizing its core aims and approach along Aristotelian lines, and in terms of the following three categories of engagement:
- Theory - conceptual, historical, and ethical knowledge [epistēmē] geared towards contemplation and scholarship [theoría].
- Method - critical and practical reasoning [phrónēsis] geared towards public action, policy, and decision-making [praxis].
- Application - technical expertise [technē] geared towards the creation and production [poiesis] of new cultural forms and knowledge paradigms.
For more information, please contact: Prof. Alexander Sorenson
Affiliated departments on campus:
Environmental Studies, German & Russian Studies, English, Comparative Literature, Judaic Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, History, Sociology, Philosophy, Theater Studies, Geography
Collaborating external institutions and initiatives:
The Aspen Institute (Philosophy & Society); the Umwelt Center for Germanic Studies & Environmental Humanities (Ohio State University), The Nature Institute, Critical Pathways (Utrecht University), World Trails Network
Colloquium:
Each semester, the Working Group hosts an Environmental Humanities scholar from outside the Binghamton community to present and discuss some of their ongoing research or other writing in a collaborative workshop format. If you are interested in attending one of these events remotely, please reach out to the organizer. For a list of past speakers, please see the Current Events roster.