International Environmental Humanities Conferences

Environmental Humanities investigates how profoundly the social and the political are entangled in the natural, and how disturbingly the anthropocentric thought and set of attitudes continue to determine the current ways of relating to the earth. In order to change the way people perceive and treat the earth, environmental humanities scholars have been working hard to free knowledge structures from anthropocentric shackles, to rethink our being in the world and our relations to other species in ecologically responsible ways. Although experienced differently at regional scales, the global climate change, for example, is fueled daily with the anthropocentric mindset so closely allied with the fossil-fuel economies, and so are all the environmental problems we encounter: plastic pollution in landscapes and waterscapes, deforestation, wildfires, species extinction, soil degradation, drying lakes and rivers, and all forms of environmental injustices. In short, anthropocentrism feeds the social, ecological, and political processes of domination and exploitation, repression and oppression. To effectively step up on these environmental challenges, Environmental Humanities centers and programs in higher education around the world study the impacts of climate change and other environmental issues in the cultural imaginary. These centers and programs have been contributing effectively to finding sustainable solutions to a host of environmental problems, using transformative ideas from literary and cultural studies, arts, and philosophy.

Environmental Humanities Center at Cappadocia University will join this international consortium with the aim of spreading environmental awareness with ecologically oriented discourses in classrooms, conferences, seminars, and workshops both regionally and internationally. The Center supports the idea that collaboration is the key to resolve environmental challenges, and supports interdisciplinary research that advances knowledge about human-nonhuman relations in social, cultural, scientific, and historical contexts. In contesting anthropocentrism, spreading environmental awareness, developing ethical ways of addressing social and environmental complexities, and investing in ecologically oriented cultural discourses, we will work on climate change, nature-cultures, human/nonhuman relations, toxicity, bodies, posthuman ecologies, the Anthropocene complexities, environmental/species/climate justice issues, global pollution, and a host of related matters within both a global and a national context. The goal of EHC at Cappadocia University is to foster ecologically oriented transdisciplinary research. Ecological threats know no borders or divisions and travel freely without any restrictions, so will our projects and ideas.
 

For the international conferences organized by the Environmental Humanities Center, Cappadocia University, we invite scholars to discuss the branches/waves and the new directions of environmental humanities, including recent theories, emerging topics and new challenges, converging and diverging points from other ecological approaches in social sciences and the humanities (such as social ecology, environmental history, ecopsychology, etc.), its alliances with natural sciences, its activist impulses, and its transcultural and transnational visions.