As part of the upcoming Environmental History Week of the American Society for Environmental History later this month, we have put together a session based on EHN’s ongoing blog series on Problems of Place, featuring graduate students and early career scholars who will discuss the importance of community, connection, and belonging. The series on EHN aims to generate open, honest dialogue about issues frequently relegated within academic conversations, particularly the personal challenges that scholars face in trying to ground one’s self and scholarship while remaining committed to research and professional development. While the series explores such questions in text, this session seeks to create a metaphoric place for these conversations to happen live and dynamically, despite spatial distance.
The global pandemic of COVID-19 has trapped many people sheltering “in-place.” Simultaneously, more human activity than ever before is transpiring place-lessly over the internet, in cyber rooms, and digital spaces. These contradictory trends only exacerbate a conundrum common to young scholars in environmental history: the personal/intellectual drive to be rooted in the past and place, versus the economic imperatives to be migratory and mutable. While there are many structural issues that need to be addressed, this session will break some of the tacit silence on a series of problems that drive many scholars, especially those from underrepresented groups, from careers in the academy. How can academia be more inclusive? How can intellectual communities be crafted between heterogeneous individuals, across global distances, and despite economic precarity?
We’re excited for Ligia Arguilez, Anaïs Got, Endia Hayes, Sofia de la Rosa, Nicole Tu-Maung, Alexandra Vlachos, and Faizah Zakaria to share their ideas of place in the April 21 session moderated by Anastasia Day and Elizabeth Hameeteman.
| Problems of Place: A Conversation on Community, Connection, and Belonging *Date: April 21, 2021 *Time: 9am EST / 3pm CET / 9pm SG To register, click here. |
*Cover image: Artistic depiction of what the interior of an O’Neill cylinder space colony might look like. For more, see “Space Colony Artwork From the 1970s” from the NASA Ames Research Center.
[*Cover image description: A landscape with tree-covered hills and a lake at the bottom of a see-through cylinder, with planets and stars in the background.]