Methodological Challenges In Nature Culture And Environmental History Research

This book examines the challenges and possibilities of conducting cultural environmental history research today. Disciplinary commitments certainly influence the questions scholars ask and the ways they seek out answers, but some methodological challenges go beyond the boundaries of any one discipline. The book examines: how to account for the fact that humans are not the only actors in history yet dominate archival records; how to attend to the non-visual senses when traditional sources offer only a two-dimensional, non-sensory version of the past; how to decolonize research in and beyond the archives; and how effectively to use sources and means of communication made available in the digital age. This book will be a valuable resource for those interested in environmental history and politics, sustainable development and historical geography.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History presents a cutting-edge overview of the dynamic and ever-expanding field of environmental history. It addresses recent transformations in the field and responses to shifting scholarly, political, and environmental landscapes. The handbook fully and critically engages with recent exciting changes, contextualizes them within longer-term shifts in the field, and charts potential new directions for study. It focuses on five key areas: Theories and concepts related to changing considerations of social justice, including postcolonial, antiracist, and feminist approaches, and the field’s growing emphasis on multiple human voices and agencies. The roles of non-humans and the more-than-human in the telling of environmental histories, from animals and plants to insects as vectors of disease and the influences of water and ice, the changing theoretical approaches and the influence of concepts in related areas such as animal and discard studies. How changes in theories and concepts are shaping methods in environmental history and shifting approaches to traditional sources like archives and oral histories as well as experiments by practitioners with new methods and sources. Responses to a range of current complex problems, such as climate change, and how environmental historians can best help mitigate and resolve these problems. Diverse ways in which environmental historians disseminate their research within and beyond academia, including new modes of research dissemination, teaching, and engagements with stakeholders and the policy arena. This is an important resource for environmental historians, researchers and students in the related fields of political ecology, environmental studies, natural resources management and environmental planning. Chapters 9, 10 and 26 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists, and digital historians elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, and practices with the public and of their digital context. The handbook applies an international and comparative approach, looks at the historical development of the field, focuses on technical background and the use of specific digital media and tools. Furthermore, the handbook analyzes connections with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, indicating directions for future research, and teaching activities.

This book takes an intimate, collaborative, interdisciplinary autoethnographic approach that both emphasizes the authors’ entangled relationships with the more-than-human, and understands the land and sea-scapes of Newfoundland as integral to their thinking, theorizing, and writing. The authors draw on feminist, trans, queer, critical race, Indigenous, decolonial, and posthuman theories in order to examine the relationships between origins, memories, place, identities, bodies, pasts, and futures. The chapters address a range of concerns, among them love, memory, weather, bodies, vulnerability, fog, myth, ice, desire, hauntings, and home. Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural geography, folklore, and anthropology, as well as those working in autoethnography, life writing, and island studies.

Aimed at students and scholars new to environmental history, the history of technology, and their nexus, this impressive synthesis looks outward and forward—identifying promising areas in more formative stages of intellectual development and current synergies with related areas that have emerged in the past few years, including environmental anthropology, discard studies, and posthumanism.

This book focuses on three broad and intertwined concerns in Indigenous education across several settler-colonial settings such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Within these settler-colonial contexts, many Indigenous learners continue to be failed by education policies and practices, while teaching and learning – all too often concomitantly – reproduce and maintain deficit perspectives and expectations from those in the wider community towards Indigenous Peoples. The contributions presented in this book seek to interrupt this cycle in some way and share three broad and intertwined areas of focus: Holistic and more-than-human view of the world and knowledge making practices Critical engagement with the ongoing legacies of colonial institutions, practices and histories And efforts that seek to reveal and address social injustices, inequities and discrimination. The book highlights the work of scholars who are actively working to privilege Indigenous ways of working and/or recognising the resilience of Indigenous peoples in all aspects of education. Critical Studies and the International Field of Indigenous Education Research offers inspiration, hope and practices to learn from and with. In doing so, a wider community of researchers and professionals can draw on the ideas and strategies to help inform their efforts within the settings they work and live. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.

From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community’s protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.

Indigenous research is an important and burgeoning field of study. With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for the Indigenization of higher education and growing interest within academic institutions, scholars are exploring research methodologies that are centred in or emerge from Indigenous worldviews, epistemologies, and ontology. This new edited collection moves beyond asking what Indigenous research is and examines how Indigenous approaches to research are carried out in practice. Contributors share their personal experiences of conducting Indigenous research within the academy in collaboration with their communities and with guidance from Elders and other traditional knowledge keepers. Their stories are linked to current discussions and debates, and their unique journeys reflect the diversity of Indigenous languages, knowledges, and approaches to inquiry. Indigenous Research: Theories, Practices, and Relationships is essential reading for students in Indigenous studies programs, as well as for those studying research methodology in education, health sociology, anthropology, and history. It offers vital and timely guidance on the use of Indigenous research methods as a movement toward reconciliation.