December 2, 2025 | 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. | Auerbach Library, MESH
Organised in cooperation with the IFDG (Interdisciplinary Research Center for Didactics in the Humanities)
Prof Dr Bethany Wiggin (University of Pennsylvania)
Register here: https://form.jotform.com/252933970112051
This workshop introduces tools designed to pluralize the production of environmental knowledge in one American city, Philadelphia. Exploring insights gleaned from ongoing public participatory research projects, including My Climate Story and An Ecotopian Toolkit, the workshop invites participants to reflect on how these tools might (or might not) be translated and used in other spaces and places. Together we can consider the constitution and working of knowledge and action communities that work against environmental humanities and for environmental justice.
Participants of the workshop are recommended the following paper as preparatory reading:
- Van Dooren, Thom, et al. "Developing the Public Environmental Humanities: Challenges, Opportunities, and Lessons." Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities, vol. 11 no. 2, 2024, p. 6-44. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/res.2024.a953845.
Bethany Wiggin is currently on research leave from the University of Pennsylvania where she is Professor in the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies. While on leave, she is a visiting researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. In 2024-25 she was the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. From 2014-24, she served as the Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Her scholarship bridges fields: environmental and energy humanities, public humanities, critical university studies, anthropocene history, utopianism and future studies, history of the Atlantic world and early modern studies. She has written extensively about trade and migration as well as language and cultural translation since the Columbian exchange across the north Atlantic world; while on leave, she is completing the monograph, Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods, and doing field work with energy justice activists working to oppose the massive build out of liquid natural gas facilities.
Recent publications include two special issues (in press), one on environmental futures with the World Futures Review and the other on participatory research methods for energy justice with the journal Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities The latter publishes articles made by the Intersecting Energy Cultures working group that Wiggin co-led from 2022-2024. Bethany also published an article on activists’ opposition to the expansion of natural gas infrastructure in Europe and the U.S. and the transatlantic networks and stories they’re creating in the volume The Energy Trilemma in the Baltic Sea Region, and she co-authored two articles on the public environmental humanities, one published in the journal Resistance and the other, co-authored with former students and in press in the journal Environmental Humanities. She is currently advising a NSF grant to the National Humanities Alliance designed to document and report on environmental arts-science research projects and is expanding a lecture given at Princeton, “Toward a Civic Science.”