Experiments in the Environmental Humanities: A Visit with Allison Carruth
By: Laura Murphy
On January 27, 2023, Professor Allison Carruth from Princeton University’s Environmental Art and Media Lab joined DePaul University HumanitiesX (HX) Fellows and other members of the DePaul community to discuss and explore the environmental humanities (EH).
Attending this event as a Student Fellow from the HX team was invigorating. I came out of the experience with a newfound appreciation of the role that climate narratives can play in raising awareness. Prof. Carruth showed me the importance of engaging with local community members, the place that media and storytelling can occupy in the climate crisis, and the creative encouragement to reimagine climate realities.
Prior to her public talk, Prof. Carruth met with the six HX Student Fellows to casually converse about her inspiring work and listen to our thoughts on these subjects as well. Together, we spoke about the role that the arts and humanities play in the fight for environmental activism, and the significant impact that telling localized stories has on showing the realities of climate change.
Student Fellow Miranda Kincer later reflected “My biggest takeaway from our conversation is that collaboration is the difference between creating something that is good and creating something that is revolutionary. One person can’t change the world alone, so finding others with different talents who are passionate about the same things allows the scope of your project to really grow beyond yourself.”
“My biggest takeaway from our conversation is that collaboration is the difference between creating something that is good and creating something that is revolutionary. One person can’t change the world alone, so finding others with different talents who are passionate about the same things allows the scope of your project to really grow beyond yourself.” — Miranda Kincer, HumanitiesX Student Fellow and Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse major
At her public talk the following day, Prof. Carruth began with a slideshow presentation of her work in the environmental humanities. She described the environmental humanities as, “cultural, historical, and political” and as “a relatively young interdisciplinary field.” The first journal in English dedicated to the field, Environmental Humanities, debuted in 2012, followed by the first issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities one year later. The confluence of subfields that have shaped EH go back many decades, however, including environmental history, environmental anthropology, environmental ethics, ecocriticism, political ecology, and cultural geography.
When I asked her if there was anything she would like to add to the conversation around the environmental humanities, Prof. Carruth wrote, “EH is at once analytical and tactical, theoretical and experimental. Its scholars-practitioners work to know planetary crises in their unequal and uneven particularities and to link lived experiences of them with their scientific and structural dimensions.” Ultimately, she said, the field, “works to know and imagine futures that arc away from disaster and toward livability and justice.”
Ultimately, the field “works to know and imagine futures that arc away from disaster and toward livability and justice.” Professor Allison Carruth, Princeton University
Prof. Carruth then shared with the audience multiple projects from her work in the media lab, including the UCLA Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), an incubator for new research and climate storytelling, communications and media where faculty and students collaborate across disciplines to explore today’s environmental challenges.
She shared the “Play the LA River” project, a playable card deck of the 51-mile LA river that walks participants through an interactive journey to learn about the local ecology. She also described the Blue Lab Climate Stories Incubator, where collaborators’ work is propelled by the animating question of “how diverse people and places are making sense of real time climate change as well as proposals for climate action in the specific contexts of places they love, value, and call home.”
HumanitiesX Student Fellow Emily Figueroa was quite taken with the digital and creative elements of Carruth’s work. “Prof. Carruth’s visit proved to me that environmentalism has a place in the digital world. These movements have a place in film, art, and media so it just needs the right people to move those projects along,” she said.
The presentation ended with a collaborative Question and Answer session with the audience. Prof. Carruth led us through an experiential writing assignment, and asked us to write down our responses to questions such as “What do you think of when you think of nature in Chicago?” followed by “What do you imagine your environmental imagination is missing?” She urged us to think about what communities or landscapes or experiences were absent from our initial reflections.
Barbara Willard, professor of environmental communication, and one of the audience members attending, shared her experience about the public talk. “This talk inspired an appreciation for the power of narrative to shape our understanding of and passion for the natural world.”
“This talk inspired an appreciation for the power of narrative to shape our understanding of and passion for the natural world.” — Professor Barbara Willard, DePaul University
Following the public presentation, Prof. Carruth then met with each team of our HX Faculty and Community Fellows to discuss the specific objectives for their course and brainstorm elements of the course projects– which will themselves become part of an environmental humanities display here at DePaul.
Later, I connected with Prof. Carruth by email to get her reflections on her visit with us. “Getting to know the HX initiative and the faculty and students who are involved this year was inspiring. The robustly multidisciplinary configuration of the teaching teams and the creativity of the student fellows stood out for me. The visit was energizing and meaningful for my own work as an environmental humanities researcher and the director of an experimental environmental research, art and storytelling lab at Princeton.”
Coming away from these two days, I gained hope for the possibility of our future. It can be easy to feel negative about the future of the environment, but another option is to use that energy to fuel our imagination and design a future vision of flourishing. As a student of Communications and Media myself, I now understand the vital role I can play in using my skills to foster climate narratives in my community and best connect with people to make an impact based on what they care about.
Laura Murphy is a DePaul University alumna and a 2022 HumanitiesX Student Fellow
