Attending next week’s conference of the European Society for Environment History?
Consider joining our online 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 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? While our ongoing Problems of Place blog series explores these questions in text, this virtual session seeks to create a metaphoric place for these conversations to happen live and dynamically, despite spatial distance.
We’re excited for Endia Hayes, Sofía de la Rosa Solano, Ramya Swayamprakash, Eline Tabak, Diana Valencia, and Faizah Zakaria to share their reflections in this session moderated by Anastasia Day and Elizabeth Hameeteman.
Join us on Monday, July 4 at 15:00-16:30 BST.
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We’re also getting together for a Coffee Chat on Tuesday, July 5 at 15:00 BST.
Come say hi!
*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.]