The UMass Amherst EH Collaborative began in earnest in Spring 2020. The co-leads from the Department of English (Malcolm Sen) and Women Gender and Social Studies (Kiran Asher and Banu Subramaniam), all shared the urgent need of decolonial methods to shape climate action and sustainability discourses. Those concenres became alarmingly obvious as the Covid-19 crisis unfolded around the world. Other units, such as the Department of History (David Glassberg), Department of Anthropology (Boone Shear) and the then Department of Geography (Eve Vogel) were active participants in those early seminars and zoom lectures.

Simultaneously, The Renaissance of the Earth project was launched at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, bringing together students and researchers across the humanities and sciences to explore what we can learn by engaging the early modern past with questions about our environmental future.

Today, with active collaboration from multiple HFA and STEM faculty, EH witnesses a curricular expansion and greater campus vitality, attracting stellar undergraduate and graduate students each passing year. Strategic partners in this journey have included Centers such as the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies (through the leadership of Marjorie Rubright), the Department of Art and Architecture (through the engagement of Meg Vickery and Sandy Litchfield), the School of Earth and Sustainability (through the leadership of Rob DeConto, and the participation of Eve Vogel, Julie Bringham-Grette, and others), Natural Resource Conservation (Lena Fletcher), and the School of Public Policy (through the participation of Thad Miller). EH scholars from HFA have won campus-level undergraduate sustainability awards, 3M competitions, and some of them are now actively working in the sustainability sector in Massachusetts. Our students have also been active in the historical and permaculture gardens on campus, and their work has been showcased in campus studios and galleries and has won them prestigious Chancellor’s awards. 

The Anthropocene Lab is an interdisciplinary group of humanists, scientists, social scientists, and artists at UMass Amherst who seek new interdisciplinary narratives about the Anthropocene in an effort to engage the deep past and shared futures, humans and non-human communities. 

In this laboratory of ideas, we ask: "What are, and how are, dominant narratives about the Anthropocene created? Which interdisciplinary practices and research agendas create better narratives?" Through discussions and collaborations across the UMass Amherst system, and through fieldwork in iconic sites in the region and beyond, we seek to provide narrative and pedagogical pathways towards sustainable futures. 

The Earth stands deconstructed as a financialized globe and a technological orb in the Anthropocene. It is the “planet” to be “saved” according to climate action narratives. TAP emerges from an understanding that hegemonic sustainability sciences, green capitalism, and industry-led energy transition narratives often bypass the cultural glue that historical conceptions and indigenous, pre-modern epistemologies of the earth have made the planet a safe, habitable, and thrivable commons. It asks: how might we re-imagine the earth as the construction of cultural imaginaries instead? What political potentialities emerge when we deconstruct techno-futuristic visions of the earth and reimagine superintelligence as cultural wisdom: the earth as common wealth? To reconstruct lost world views requires humanistic interference in sustainability paradigms and humanistic engagement with the art(e)facts by which we come to know, understand, and inhabit the earth. TAP charts a way forward. 

An artefact traditionally means something made by human hands — the opposite of naturally occurying phenomena or materials. The Anthropocene is the geological epoch defined by human making at planetary scale. So the Anthropocene is, in a sense, the era when artefacts stopped being the exception and became the substrate on which human history unfolds. We could argue that humans now live inside an artefact, an anthropogenically modified Earth.

The Renaissance of the Earth revolutionizes what it means to engage the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Through a range of cross-disciplinary collaborative models, it puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research agenda with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life.

WSIP is an international collective of faculty and activist intellectuals devoted to decolonial paradigm-rethinking.  Working within longue-durée, non-eurocentric, and intersectional frameworks, our interdisciplinary research and pedagogy center on collaborative methods. Through non-competitive idea-sharing, listening, and trust-building, we seek to actualize among ourselves the very forms of ethical community that we imagine for decolonized futures. Co-coordinated by Professors Mwangi wa Gῖthῖnji (Economics), Laura Doyle (English), and Asha Nadkarni (English), WSIP receives crucial support from both the Mellon Foundation and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. See more here

Environmental Humanities (EH) scholarship responds to the long history of environmental exploitation of colonized peoples, and the economic, ecological, racial, and gendered dimensions of such exploitation. It is equally interested in understanding current resource wars, food shortages, the rise of epidemics, the importance of multispecies imaginaries, and the place of nation-state politics at a time of climate breakdown. It argues that to better understand and respond to the climate crisis scientific and humanities perspectives are equally crucial. Students who earn this specialization will have a comprehensive understanding of the roles of capital, culture, and politics at a time of rapid climate change. They will engage with literature and other arts from across the globe, and also gain some understanding of ecological concepts. Read more here