Environmental Humanities @ UT

The environmental humanities (EH) arose as a scholarly formation in the early 2000s. EH brings the methods and perspectives of the arts and humanities to bear on environmental experience, change, and crisis. Encompassing history, anthropology, religious studies, literary and media studies, and Black, ethnic, and Indigenous studies, among other fields, EH learns from but also challenges technoscientific approaches to environmental issues. EH scholars and creators promote critique, action, ethical engagement, social justice, and representation and performance across media.  

Environmental Humanities @ UT (EH @UT) emerged as a speaker and workshop series housed in the Department of English in 2014. The community of EH scholars at UT Austin is robust and growing with new faculty hires, graduate student admissions, and course offerings every year. This growth attests to the field's expansion beyond the UT campus, with scholars, planners, and policymakers alike acknowledging the centrality of the arts and humanities to addressing 21st-century environmental crises. Several initiatives at UT Austin have built and continue to build this community, including the 2015-16 Texas Institute for Literary & Textual Studies (TILTS) on “Environmental Humanities," Planet Texas 2050, the Institute for Historical Studies 2020-21 theme on "Climate in Context," and the 2020-22 Humanities Institute Faculty Fellows Seminar on "The Humanities in the Environment / The Environment in the Humanities."

Upcoming Events

Please join us for our upcoming "works-in-progress" series, organized by Professors Heather Houser and Alex Beasley, which will feature current work by UT EH-affiliated faculty and graduate students. If you are interested in sharing work in our series, or if you would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact Professor Heather Houser at houserh@utexas.edu. Our 2020-2021 events are below:

April 15, 2022, 2-3pm Glickman Conference Center, RLP 1.302E

Work in Progress with Erin McElroy, Assistant Professor of American Studies at UT Austin. 

Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where their work engages intersections of property, eviction, technology, data, and empire in the US and Romania. Their current book project, Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno-Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Times, explores postsocialist contexts of racial dispossession, gentrification, and technocapitalism, as well as housing organizing, hacking, and anti-imperial world-making in Romania, Moldova, and Silicon Valley. Erin is also cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—a counter-cartography and digital media collective that produces maps, tools, zines, murals, and narrative-based work to support the work of housing justice in gentrifying cities, and which recently published Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press). Through the AEMP, Erin is currently leading Landlord Tech Watch, a collaborative project dedicated to producing scholarship related to property technology and the automation of gentrification. Additionally, Erin is an editor of the Radical Housing Journal, an open access journal that brings together housing organizers and researchers transnationally.

“Spells for Outer Space” comprises the final chapter of Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Times—a forthcoming manuscript project that traces spatial, racial, and technological transformations undergirding postsocialist and post-Cold War transitions, fantasies, and lived experiences. Based upon fieldwork conducted throughout the 2010s in Romania, Moldova, and Silicon Valley, the book is based upon grounded relationalities with housing organizers, hackers, artists, and evictees to show that processes of Siliconization, while alive and well in postsocialist times, are only of many possible technological futures being spun. This chapter weaves together socialist astrofuturism portrayed in Romanian and Moldovan film, art, and speculative fiction with ethnographic observations of capitalist ruination. I begin with a close reading of the film, Gagarin’s Tree, by Mona Vǎtǎmanu and Florin Tudor (2016), which features the Romanian scholar of decolonization, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, who waxes philosophical over socialist visions of developing an anti-capitalist and Third World international utopia in outer space, and then cultivating them on earth. While illustrating materialities that emerged from these dreams, including the planting of countless “communist oak trees,” I also question why these fantasies crumbled after 1989. I show that while communist utopianism was based upon friendships with other Second and Third World peoples, and while in large part it was developed in resistance to pre-socialist fascism, state socialism never managed to fully resolve its own internal anti-Roma racism. What might have happened if socialist-era astrofuturism could have better learned from the rich work of what Roma feminist playwright Mihaela Drăgan describes as Roma futurism? Might both the Siliconized astrofuturism as well as the anti-Roma racism dominating the postsocialist present have been averted? By entangling Roma techno-witchcraft with anti-capitalist solidarities, perhaps new anti-imperial futures may still be cast.

Spells For Outer Space Chapter Draft

EH @ UT Affiliates