Imaginings
stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other imaginative accounts of the natural world
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City Environments around the Globe: Past Challenges, Future Visions
Workshop Report (15–16 December 2018, New York University, NY) The new collaboration between Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU Munich) and New York University (NYU) focuses on understanding urban environments over time, and aims to explore urban issues and challenges via a comparative, transnational, and global framework. Participants: Christof Mausch and Talitta Reitz, Rachel Carson Center/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich; Sophia Kolantzakos, NYU-Abu Dhabi; and Mary Killilea and Anne…
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Impressions from Kvarken and Vaasa
Nestled between Vaasa in Finland and UmeÃ¥ in Sweden is a mysterious moving landscape. The geology of the Kvarken Archipelago National Park makes it a dynamic and transient place, yet the recognizable Scandinavian climate and ecology lends it a timeless quality. In 2006 it became Finland’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site due to these unique…
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Snapshot: Ecocritics Welcome Here!
On 15 February, the RCC played host to a poster exhibition on ecocriticism. Master’s-level students working with Dr Felicitas Meifert-Menhard from LMU Munich’s English department had spent a semester learning about the wide reach and application of reading literary texts ecologically—not just contemporary texts concerned with anthropogenic climate change, but also much older texts that…
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Placing Gender: Gender and Environmental History
By Katie Holmes and Ruth Morgan: Despite Carolyn Merchant’s provocative 1990 article on gender and environment in the Journal of American History, this multifaceted discipline remains an under-developed area of inquiry. For example, the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) conference in July 2017 hosted just one panel on gender and environmental history, while presentations…
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Anthropocene and Citizen Science
Workshop Report: Anthropocene and Citizen Science: Evidence Gained through the “Opening-up” of Academic Knowledge Production? (19–20 July 2018, Munich) By Fabienne Will *Photos courtesy of author In July 2018, the Deutsches Museum hosted a workshop organized by the two projects Evidence Practices at the Interstice of Sciences, Humanities and the Public: The Anthropocene Debate and…
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Feeling Eco-Adventurous? An Interview with Author John Morano
John Morano is a professor of journalism at Monmouth University in New Jersey. He has written four novels in his Eco-Adventure Series, as well as a textbook for film critics, Don’t Tell Me the Ending! He is currently working on his fifth novel, a story about endangered wolves. What motivated your transition from journalism to…
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Migrations, Crossings, Unintended Destinations: Ecological Transfers across the Indian Ocean, 1850–1920
Conference Report (11–12 October 2018, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany) By Ulrike Kirchberger (*Featured Image: “If someday…” by Abhijit Kar Gupta, CC-BY 2.0 via flickr. ) In the age of empire, thousands of species of plants and animals were transferred between Australia, Asia, and Africa. European settlers transported cattle, horses, and…
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The History of Munich’s Waste Management
This post by Christian Schnurr, a student of the RCC-LMU Environmental Studies Certificate Program, stems from his research conducted as part of the exhibition project “Ecopolis: Understanding and Imagining Munich’s Environments.” Unless otherwise indicated, images are courtesy of AWM. Source: AWM Festschrift. An opera about rubbish disposal? Die Stadt, composed by Nélida Béjar and directed by Björn…
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Empirical Ecocriticism
Workshop Report (14–15 December 2018, Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany) By Alexa Weik von Mossner and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson On 14 and 15 December 2018, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society hosted the workshop Empirical Ecocriticism. Empirical ecocriticism is an emerging subfield of ecocriticism that focuses on the empirically grounded study of environmental narrative—in literature,…