About EHCo

Territorial Acknowledgement

We acknowledge and respect the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Esquimalt) Peoples on whose territory the university stands, and the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

About Us

The UVic Environmental Humanities Collective (EHCo) began as a group of professors from departments across the Faculty of Humanities, whose teaching and research connected with environmental issues or climate change. It quickly expanded to include colleagues who hadn’t yet worked in those areas, but who had shared concerns about these issues, as well as around colonization. Our intention is for the EHCo to become ever more public-facing as time goes on, emphasizing teaching and public events.

The EHCo’s members share, in particular, a deep concern about anthropogenic climate change; the mitigation of climate change and the adaptation to climate change; and the discourses around these subjects. In solidarity with many others around the world, we take the view that it is not too late to respond to climate change. Our particular position, simply, is that the humanities have a crucial role to play in how climate change will play out in human culture, and how humans will face up to the anthro- of anthropogenic climate change. As has been often said, the response to climate change isn’t a technical problem, but a cultural one.

As a discipline, the environmental humanities are interested in relations between the cultural and the environmental. It’s often a mode of critique, bringing the humanistic methods of cultural studies, history, philosophy, and literary studies to bear on the subjects of its analysis, but it can often stress the potential for positive transformation. These subjects can range from such systems-level issues as governmental structures, to topics as precise as the role of gender in a particular text’s depiction of social change.

Using environmental humanities methods and materials, the members of the UVic EHCo have taught courses in Religious Studies; English; Germanic and Slavic Studies; History; Philosophy; Gender Studies; and elsewhere. These pages will include a list of such past courses and their instructors, as well as a list of upcoming courses touching on the environmental humanities.