culture

The Extinction Studies Working Group is a group of humanities scholars researching and writing on the themes of time, death, generations, and extinction.

The Environmental History Network for the Middle Ages (ENFORMA) website is a networking portal for researchers working on medieval environmental history, a place to share publication news, conference information, and research ideas.

Petra Tjitske Kalshoven combines ethnographic studies with ornithological testimonies to present the re-creation and reenactment of the extinct great auk, or garefowl. The author aims to achieve contiguity with lost species through expressions and shaping of human perceptions and imaginations of past, and eventually future, environmental disasters.

Micheal Richardson investigates the impact of envisioning climate catastrophe in three works, namely George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Marina Zurkow’s animation Slurb (2009), and Briohny Doyle’s novel The Island Will Sink (2016).

Xenia Cherkaev and Elena Tipikina examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. The investigate how the program affected human-dog relations.

The authors promote the idea of “Natural Governance” as a new approach to conservation based on three pillars, namely ecology, cooperation, and cultural systems.

The authors explore the implementation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Indigenous knowledge (IK) in mapping efforts, taking cues from previous spatio-temporal visualization work in the Geographic(al) Information System(s)/Science(s) GIS community, and from temporal depictions extant in existing cultural traditions.

Erika Amethyst Szymanski investigates the impact of synthetic yeast, which is gaining ground in a variety of foodscapes, and reflects upon the meaning of Terroir that synthetic yeast brings about.