Prefiguring Futures We Want: Community Engaged Scholarship and the Environmental Humanities

Seminar

Date: Thursday 18 December 2025

Time: 13.00 – 15.00

Location: Accelerator

This lecture, part of The Green Zone Seminar Series, explores how community-engaged scholarship can expand the environmental humanities. Drawing on a decade of public projects, Bethany Wiggin reflects on how university-community collaborations can build democratic, transdisciplinary research networks for more sustainable futures.

Abstract

Bethany Wiggin will present.

Drawing on ten years of lessons learned from public environmental humanities projects, this talk invites discussion about how community engaged scholarship can broaden methods and practices of the environmental humanities and environmental studies more generally. Amidst apparently accelerating paths into increasingly uncertain and downright risky eco-social futures, how might collaborative campus-community partnerships slowly and patiently build transdisciplinary, democratic research networks? Amidst dystopian presents, how are we already pre-figuring such networks and paths toward a university for the future? In dialogue with sustainability and critical university studies as well as movement theory, this talk explores several ongoing cross-institutional environmental collaborations in the United States

Bio

Bethany Wiggin joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor in 2003 and was promoted to Professor in 2022. Working with students, she founded the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) in 2015, and she served as Founding Director until 2024. Her primary appointment is in the Department of French, Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures, and at Penn she also serves on the graduate groups in Comparative Literature and English and International Studies at the Lauder Institute. Her books and essays explore histories of trade, migration and settler colonialism; multilingualism and cultural translation; and environmental change in the Atlantic world and has appeared in publications from the PMLA to Nature. She is now writing Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods, an exploration of the multiethnic worlds European settler colonists attempted to build in the Delaware Valley and the ecological legacy of that historical chapter and its continuing reverberations.

The Green Zone Seminar Series Autumn 2025 at Accelerator Art Hall

Welcome to the higher seminar in Environmental Humanities at Stockholm University.

23/10 kl. 15.00 - 17.00 The Green Zone seminar series: Figuring Nämforsen: Image, Friction and Relationality along the Ångerman River

6/11 kl. 15.00 - 17.00 The Green Zone seminar series: Extinction Remains: The challenge of displaying contemporary mass extinction

27/11 kl. 15.00 - 17.00 The Green Zone seminar series: Narrating Transhumance and the more-than-human: Folklore and Sustainability

18/12 kl. 13.00 - 15.00 The Green Zone seminar series: Prefiguring Futures We Want: Community Engaged Scholarship and the Environmental Humanities

Christina Fredengren, Lotten Gustafsson-Reinius, Lars Kaijser and Karin Dirke.

Join the Environmental Humanities and Speculative Fiction Reading Group

The reading group will explore places where environmental humanities, archaeology and speculative fiction overlap. During the meetings, the group will read and discuss a range of texts - academic and fictional - and may write their own texts about possible futures. The reading group is open to everyone who would like to join.

Environmental Humanities and Speculative Fiction Reading Group

Theme

Last updated: October 8, 2025

Source: The Faculty of Humanities

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