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Environment and Culture Caucus
Keywords project
At the 2007 American Studies Association-Environment and Culture Caucus (ASA-ECC) Business meeting we got the ball rolling on a session that was planned, accepted and presented at the 2008 ASA meeting. This session, “Keywords in the Study of Environment and Culture,” was modeled on and linked to Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler’s NYNU Press book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007). The ECC’s session was chaired by William Gleason and comment was provided by Lawrence Buell. Papers were presented by Karla Armbruster, Nature; Kent C. Ryden, Place; Basia Irland, Eco-Art; Randel D. Hanson, Sustainability; and Christopher Sellers, Environmental Justice.
Also at the ASA’s 2008 meeting, Bruce Burgett and Deborah Kimmey presented a session on the website they and Glenn have developed as a place to continue developing their keywords project online. Please see http://www.keywords.nyupress.org/ In the book and on the site, you will find Vermonja R. Alston’s keyword essay on environment.
Working with Bruce and Glenn and building on the momentum from the “Keywords in the Study of Environment and Culture” panel at the 2008 ASA, Joni Adamson and Bill Gleason of the ASA’s Environment and Culture Caucus have launched a special Keywords Blog to create a new “state of the field” inventory and analysis of the central terms in the study of environment and culture. This project will be hosted by the NYNU Keywords site and administrated by Deborah Kimmey of the University of Washington. Ours will be the first working group exploring the possibilities of developing projects through the Keywords for American Cultural Studies site.
If you go to the homepage for the Keywords site, you will be able to view a Powerpoint of Bruce’s 2008 ASA session on the possibilities for working groups using the site. Deborah Kimmey, who administrates the website, was part of this panel. You can also view a blog on the session that took place both before and after the conference session. The blog highlights discussions surrounding the value of online projects leading to both online publications and traditional publications.
The goal of our working group’s project is to build on Vermonja Alston’s essay on “Environment” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies and create a new “state of the field” inventory and analysis of the central terms we currently use in the study of environment and culture. We intend to develop an expanded list of “keywords” in this field through collaborative conversation and scholarly exchange. Like Keywords for American Cultural Studies itself, the roots of this project may be found in the iconic “blank pages” at the end of Raymond Williams’s Key Words, and one of our goals is to inscribe our field more fully into those pages. At the same time, we wish more specifically to expand and reconsider the influential inventories already included in such important volumes as, for example, Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), Carolyn Merchant’s Radical Ecology (1992; 2005), and the Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (2004), which have already offered powerful models for identifying and defining central terms for the study of environment and culture.
We invite colleagues from all disciplines and departments to join with us in this project. Our first step will be to develop, collaboratively, an expanded list of “keywords” in the field. We see the blog thus first as a space to discuss potential terms, in the process modeling and reflecting on the ways we see our disciplines (and inter-disciplines) contributing to the broader critical conversations surrounding environmentalism, environmental justice, sustainability, place, climate change, and other central topics. We thus also imagine this shared space, in other words, as a place to discuss the ways that different fields, in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, might work together to solve interlinked social and environmental challenges.
After we have generated an expanded list of terms, we will work (likely through the Keywords Collaboratory) to produce Keyword-style entries for a new volume on Keywords in the Study of Environment and Culture. As the first research working group to utilize this site, we will be participating with the site organizers in imagining what can happen in online research spaces and collaboratives.
If you have any questions, please email either Joni Adamson (Joni.Adamson@asu.edu) or William Gleason (bgleason@Princeton.EDU). We look forward to the start of an interesting conversation.
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