Weaving the environmental humanities: Australian strands, configurations, and provocations

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article contributes an Australian perspective to this special issue’s exploration of the parameters of the emerging cross-disciplinary field of the environmental humanities, and its relationship to ecocriticism. Whereas in the US, and to some extent also in the UK, environmental humanities are seen to be closely associated with literary studies, in Australia, the project of the ‘ecological humanities’, inaugurated at the Australian National University in the late 1990s, was more firmly located in environmental history, ecophilosophy and ethnography (especially Aboriginal Studies). Crossing the divides between the natural and social sciences and the arts and humanities, as well as between western and other (especially, Aboriginal) ways of knowing, this project also had an expressly decolonial agenda. In reflecting on the Australian experience from my current vantage-point in England, I hope to give impetus to the further development of the environmental humanities in the UK and Ireland as a richly inter- and transdisciplinary field, in which ecocritics might be drawn into new kinds of collaboration and forms of knowledge.