![]() What we shared was an “ecological imperative,” the theme of that summer’s meeting. Literary Studies, Performance, Social Anthropology, Art History. ![]() I’d met some two dozen fellow grad students the day before, a few of whom were bobbing in the clear water next to me. Should I even be here? And yet I also watch academics who downplay their labor as labor too often, who are told to feel grateful for things that, in many professions, are unquestioned, like job security and a living wage-neither of which, we doctoral students are told regularly, we can expect after graduating, or ever. The dissonance made me think, more than once, of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, in which Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg play sisters (depressed and anxious, respectively) who experience a violent apocalypse on a lavish country estate. Gratitude for our surroundings mixed with increasingly anxious and progressively depressed talks about injustice inflicted unevenly by a swiftly heating planet. You could do far worse for academic gatherings. Candle-lit feasts with local ingredients took our nights. We were spending the week together in Schloss Wartegg, a 16th century castle-turned-hotel atop sprawling English gardens with a view of the lake. I was lucky enough to be admitted to the University of Bern’s Transhumanities Summer School, a symposium that sends emerging scholars like myself to dialogue with distinguished academics. “Here” was Lake Constance, the Switzerland side. As the water closed over my head, I remembered the sense of a sentence, the exact wording of which I would look up later: “Submerged, from below, seeing out from underwater, how do we think about the complexity of ecology, humanity, and the conditions of other beings from the fish-eye point of view?”(1) How fitting, I thought, after our morning, to come straight here. I stripped to my swimsuit, walked the length of the dock, and, steeling myself, slipped into the cold lake. ![]() ![]() (I wasn’t joking.) I was eager to return to it, to myself. I said this aloud to those around me as if I were joking. The idea I encountered repeatedly was that for the humanities to become truly environmental, it might take a total re-structuring of the disciplines. The aim is to explore that term-“environmental humanities”-by talking with some of the people who are shaping its meaning.įor this initial essay, I reflect on my own experience this summer as the writer-in-residence at the University of Bern’s Transhumanities Summer School, themed “The Ecological Imperative.” There, I met artists and scholars who were similarly concerned with how the humanities might play its part in progressive climate action. In this series of essays and interviews, Distributaries spotlights scholars, instructors, and students engaged with public-facing environmental humanities projects across the City University of New York. I want to submerge myself in the ocean depths, and to disappear there so as to never be seen again.The Center for the Humanities Distributaries Submerging Within the Environmental Humanities January 05, 2023 Kendimi okyanusun derinliklerine batırmak istiyorum, ki orada gözden kaybolup bir daha asla görünmeyeyim. Due to global warming, cities could be completely submerged. Küresel ısınmadan dolayı, şehirler tamamen batırılmış olabilir. I want to submerge myself in the ocean depths, and to disappear there so as to never be seen again. Definition of submerge in English Turkish dictionary batmak daldırmak batırmak
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