Starting on June 23 and continuing through the summer, dozens of volunteers have been helping to #FlipTheList on Wikipedia, adding environmental books written by scholars of color, scholars from the Global South, and/or scholars who identify as women, trans and non-binary. Volunteers have been creating new entries for these books and adding them to the Wikipedia list of environmental books. So many recommendations were submitted in June that we still have hundreds of titles we hope to add. The coming academic year is an opportunity to further this goal by engaging students in the process, which will also give them new online learning opportunities.
If you are teaching a course in any semester this year, we hope you will consider getting students involved in #FlipTheList as an assignment or component of your class. This project can offer a way of engaging with themes of social and environmental justice within environmental scholarship. The process of creating articles provides excellent practice in researching, synthesizing, and writing. In addition, contributions to the project are of course published online.
If you are a graduate student reading for comprehensive exams, you may find some of your books already on our list, or have new entries to contribute. Contributing to #FlipTheList could provide excellent practice in summarizing texts and synthesizing key themes.
[Image description: a screenshot from a Wikipedia page.]
If you would like to get involved, or get your course involved, please sign up here and within a week we’ll provide access to our crowdsourced list of over 700 books as well as instructions for how to add these books to Wikipedia.
This is a community project and we are grateful for everyone’s contributions. Getting courses involved can help us greatly broaden the scope of this work. Please get in touch via the form above if you have any questions at all. Let’s continue to #FlipTheList!
*Cover Image Credit: Photo by Christopher Slaby.
[Cover image description: A row of books on shelf]