The Work of Humanities in a Changing Climate 2016-2020

Proposal Deadline:  October 31, 2017
For projects taking place January 1, 2018-December 31, 2020

The Humanities without Walls consortium invites applications for funding from cross-institutional teams of faculty and graduate students wishing to collaboratively pursue research topics related to “The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate.”

This new research initiative continues to link the consortium partners in a common commitment to intellectual exchange and dialogue, this time around a broad question that resonates with many contemporary humanist scholars—namely, what is the work of the humanities in a changing climate? This rubric is intended to be both intellectually focused and capacious. In its narrowest interpretation, it calls for collaborative work on climate change, arguably the most pressing grand challenge of our time. We seek collaborative research in the field of environmentalhumanities, broadly conceived, as well as the development of new humanities-centeredparadigms for thinking through the limits and possibilities of climate change policy. We do so out of a conviction that the current climate crisis has deep historical roots yet to be fully tapped;that it calls for new philosophies and theories of the human and the anthropocene; that its fictions and visual cultures bear mightily on its material consequences, past, present and future; and that collaborative research on these questions and more is indispensable to scholarly expertise on the subject, in the humanities and beyond.

As a metaphor, climate change is pluripotent: it offers humanists the opportunity to think expansively about the meanings of “climate” and “change” as they manifest in their own research, and to bring their contributions to bear on cognate questions in the present. Thus “TheWork of Humanities in a Changing Climate” also hails scholars who wish to consider thepressure of other forms of contemporary “climate change” on their fields of inquiry—from achanging racial climate to a changing economic climate to the changing notion of “the public”and what it means for the intellectual work environments of humanists.

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Fall 2016
Awards

“Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene”
Project PI: Ömür Harmanşah, Associate Professor of Art History

“Garden for a Changing Climate”
Project PI:  Hannah Higgins, Professor of Art History
Co-PI: Lorelei Stewart, Director, Gallery 400

“Transmedia Collage:  Histories of Violence and Futures of Health on Chicago’s South Side” :
Project PI Patrick Jagoda, English Department, University of Chicago
Consortial Team Member: Jennifer Brier, UIC Gender and Women’s Studies and History

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