In November 2020, we aimed to refute the assumption that all pieces submitted and posted to EHN must be in English and that, in fact, we like to feature content in multiple languages. The EHN community is made up of contributors whose primary language is Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Tamil, Dutch, German, French, Mandarin, Hungarian, just to name a few. Therefore, in order to better highlight the environmental-related work and expertise in such languages as well, we shared a call for non-English content to welcome submissions from graduate students and early career scholars who identify as women, trans and/or nonbinary people in any language.
Today, we want to renew that commitment by extending an invitation.
We acknowledge that each language is an open door to a different world: a different way to think and create bonds among us, our communities, and our environment. We consider, therefore, only natural that environmental humanities should be unapologetically multilingual as they are interdisciplinary. It is not an easy step to break the English-language cage but we are convinced that this is a very much needed step into making the discipline more accessible, open, universal—even pluriversal—and why not, decolonial.
Many histories in our field are framed by colonization: resources extraction, climate crisis, power imbalance, and domination over nature and cultures dimed as the “other.” This is why, many of us are working towards the decolonization of environmental sciences and humanities, and this is a process that would be impossible and irrelevant if everything you read, see, and produce is all done and shaped only by the English language. A multilingual EHN is our way to recognize other words, other systems of knowledge, and other ways to make and understand the world we live in.
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We are seeking contributors interested in sharing a piece in a language other than English. It can cover any topic related to both research and personal experience, across any time or geographical space. Our goal is to showcase the diverse and complex experiences that people have with their environments, and normalize academic and public scholarship in many languages.
For a written post, a contributor can decide for themselves whether they would like to include a full translation or just an abstract in English. If you like to submit a piece in a signed language, you can choose to include either a full translation or an abstract in English.
The only challenge is that we are limited in our editing abilities by the languages of the EHN team (including French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil). If there’s interest in posting pieces in other languages, we’ll be seeking fluent editors who want to assist with that process.
Contributors will be considered who fit within the website’s larger goal of showcasing the environmental-related work and expertise of graduate students and early career scholars who identify as women, trans and/or nonbinary people.
If you are interested in sharing a piece on EHN, send an email to contact@envhistnow.com introducing yourself & pitching an idea.
*Cover image: iStock.
[Cover image description: Colorful speech bubbles with the hello-word in different languages.]