1,720,989 research outputs found
Talking About Climate Change: The Ecological Crisis and Narrative Form
No full textThis article examines the issue of climate change in the context of ecocriticism. It analyzes some of the narrative forms employed in the mediation of climate change science, focusing on those used by mediators who are not themselves scientists in the transmission of scientific information to a nonspecialist readership or audience. It reviews four relevant works that combine the communication of scientific theories and facts with pedagogical and motivational impulses. These include David Guggenheimer’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, Fred Pearce’s book The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change and the climate change manuals The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook and How to Save the Climate
Unintended consequences : an open educational resource about environmental health and environmental justice
No full textDespite recommendations in 1999 by the Committee on Environmental Justice Health Sciences Policy Program at the U.S. Institute of Health that provided evidence for the importance of education among medical professionals, policy makers, and the public on environmental justice (EJ) and environmental health (EH) (Medicine viii), the presence of EH and EJ content within general post-secondary curriculum remains exiguous (Carlos Garibay et al. 921). While the U.S. National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences has argued that learning about EH “can facilitate students’ learning in science, math, language, history, and civics,'' (Hursh et al. 2), environmental curricula for mobilizing accessible knowledge about EH and EJ for students regardless of their academic discipline is particularly absent. “Unintended Consequences: An Open Educational Resource About Environmental Health and Environmental Justice,” is an Environmental Humanities project delivering a podcast centered post-secondary curriculum using subjective, qualitative Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) methodology for an Open Education Resources (OER) modular EH and EJ curriculum. Since SPN uses stories as data, students learn about EJ and EH through the voices of those with lived experiences in these realms, including about the complexities of EH and EJ identification and definition. Four distinct modules each contain an instructor guide, learning outcomes, key concepts, a podcast, a unique article, and curated materials. Four distinct module themes include: “A Brief and Recent History of Environmental Health,” “Health Professionals on the Front Lines,” “On the Fenceline,” and “What Instead?” (featuring Green Chemistry, alternatives chemicals assessment, just transitions, shareholder, and consumer advocacy and sustainable business). Limitations to this research include significant subjectivity throughout, a relatively small sample size, and the small scope meant as brief introductions to a variety of aspects of these very complex realms. “Unintended Consequences” fills a gap for an urgently needed portal to accessible knowledge about manmade toxic exposures in our environment that is crucial for success for sustaining a healthy world.Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)Graduat
Paradise found : the settler colonial legacy of Beautiful British Columbia magazine
No full textOkanagan Valley of British Columbia is often depicted in Canadian settler culture as an oasis in a desert, or a Garden of Eden, thanks to its exceptional climate and semi-arid shrub steppe biome. With its fruit, tourism, and wine industries, it is best known today as place of leisure and plenty. This idyllic and utopic image of the place is, however, complicated by the complex history of its cultural and material landscape. The Okanagan idealized by Canadians is, in fact, the traditional unceded territory of, primarily, the Syilx people. Since the late 19th century, through successive phases of settler colonialism in the Okanagan, the material and cultural landscape of the area has been written over, reshaped, transformed, and remains contested in many ways.
This thesis contributes to a discussion on the making of environmental cultures through an ecocritical reading of the role of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine – with a focus on the years 1959-1983 when it was funded by the provincial government – in shaping the idealized narrative and landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan Valley that persist to this day. The visual and textual analysis of the magazine is framed by the socio-political, economic, and material history of the region from the mid to late decades of the 20th century. While international tourists were presumably the primary audience of the magazine, this thesis argues that the magazine also served the province’s campaign to attract Anglophone migrants and to ‘sell’ British Columbia and more specifically the Okanagan as an idyllic home for white settler populations. It traces and uncovers some of the recurring aesthetic tropes that have constructed and framed both the British Columbian landscape generally and within that, the Okanagan Valley, as an idyllic place to live. It contrasts the white settler colonial landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan with Indigenous imaginations of the place. It brings out the fault lines and contradictions between the imposed settler aesthetic and the material affordances of the environment.Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)Graduat
Migrant ecocriticism : unbinding movements and spaces in anthologies of ecopoetry
No full textIn the environmental humanities, curating ecopoetry into anthologies has been
transformative in defining what ecopoetry is and the extent of its scope. Yet, ecopoetry
anthologies have often un/consciously valorized the concept of “place” and, at times, legitimized
the colonial standards of a Euro-American literary canon. The territorialized discourse of
ecocriticism has created a deep divide in its goals for an environmental discourse beyond the
academic institution. On that note, ecocriticism is also a radical and outward-looking field eager
to acknowledge the gaps in its foundation, and is working towards scholarship, art, and activism
that are responsive to multiple interpretations of our relationships with the “environment.”
This dissertation analyses ten selected ecopoetry anthologies—Earth Shattering:
Ecopoems (ed. Neil Astley); Here: Poems for the Planet (ed. Elizabeth J. Coleman); Wild
Reckoning: an anthology provoked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (eds. John Burnside and
Maurice Riordan); Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (ed. Melissa Tuckey); Open
Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poem (ed. Nancy Holmes); Regreen: New Canadian
Ecological Poetry (eds. Madhur Anand and Adam Dickinson); The Ecopoetry Anthology (eds.
Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street); Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of
Philippine Ecopoetry (ed. Rina Garcia Chua); Black Nature: Four Centuries of African
American Nature Poetry (ed. Camille Dungy), and When the Light of the World was Subdued,
our Songs Came Through (ed. Joy Harjo)—using a migrant reading practice. A migrant reading
practice is a methodology that acknowledges generalized experiences and metanarratives that
shape ecopoetry anthologies but insists upon the singularity of an anthology’s curation, the
collated ecopoetry, and their counternarratives. Using a method of personal scholarly narratives,
this dissertation argues a critical migrant reading practice as a radical method to reimagining, reconceptualizing, and reconstructing the future and value of an ecopoetry anthology in the
environmental humanities to deconstruct territorialized and Euro-American concepts in
ecocriticism. A Migrant Ecocriticism is a timely and compelling framework in this world of
increasingly politicized and polarized migration of humans and more-than-humans across walls,
seas, national borders, and the boundaries of fragmented habitats.Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)Graduat
Human-riparian relating at valley-bottom : modes, methods, and marshes
No full textThis thesis is an investigation into human modes and methods of interaction with Okanagan riparian habitats. In it I tell two stories: 1) a story of doing research with riparian places, and 2) a story of a particular riparian place. The first story is about, and part of, research done by me, a visitor-scholar (non-Indigenous to this place), and prioritizes the ethics of multi-being relations and multimodality in its formulation and communication. The second story explores the riparian place forming in the margins of Brandt’s Creek, at the bottom of the Okanagan Valley, in syilx territory and Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. The riparian here is in the process of becoming, a product of its unruly heritage and the spectral ecologies that both precede and co-exist with it. The research process described is one of creating thickness in relationships to place—both mine and others’—by layering varied ways-of-being and doing. These methods were learned and developed in multi-being conversation with and about the riparian and create an experience of corrugation, which amplifies attention in a time and place by making connections to prior experiences. In the semi-arid Okanagan, riparian habitats are the wettest places a non-aquatic being can be. As such, riparian places are important meshworks of relations and possibilities for habitation. They are also places of categorical inconsistency—seasonally contingent, neither land nor water—made marginal through settler colonial and capitalist practices of invasion and acquisition, and an imaginary of place that relies on place-as-property. These two stories explore modes and methods for the analysis of settler colonial socio-ecologies—manifestations of relations between humans and the multi-being and diverse material worlds in which we live—with a focus on living sustainably in and among wetness.Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)Graduat
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Lifeworlds : interactive workshops for discovering how non-human beings experience their worlds
No full textLifeworlds is a series of three workshops/dialogical art pieces that explores how performance can be used as intervention in family-based environmental education. Each of the three workshops (“Listening with Bats,” “Passing Time with Trees,” and “Breathing with Sturgeon”) uses a combination of narrative, dialogue, and physical activity to create opportunities for participants to imagine the embodied experiences of another being (respectively bats, trees, and sturgeon) in their daily lives. The workshop outlines for Lifeworlds are designed to be adapted for a variety of geographic locations and easily replicated by educators with little or no performance training background.
The methodologies of conversation and imagination used to develop Lifeworlds come from the spheres of both applied theatre and environmental education pedagogy, as informed by my dual experiences in these fields. From the realm of applied theatre, I draw heavily on the framing and participant engagement methods of dialogical art as explained by Grant Kester, while from the realm of environmental education, I draw on Abigail Housen’s Visual Thinking Strategies and the multispecies ways of experiencing influenced by Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of umwelt.
Lifeworlds provides one possible pathway for knitting these two fields together through experiential, site-specific play and dialogue. Lifeworlds asks how performance-based methodologies can be applied to environmental education facilitation such that this workshop structure will invite future facilitators and participants to ask how imagining other beings’ ways of experiencing their environment can help us humans in creating healthier multispecies spaces.Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)Graduat
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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