This semester’s course in the Norwegian Researcher School for Environmental Humanities (NoRS-EH) is held in Trondheim, hosted by the NTNU Environmental Humanities, TransLit: Sustainable Ethics, Affects and Pedagogies and Narrating Sustainability research groups. The course begins with the premise that environmental crises are also storytelling crises. While environmental crises often demand that we turn to the sciences and technology, this course is explicitly devoted to the role that poetry, theater, fiction, sound, and transmedia arts play in environmental storytelling. Moreover, while narrative practices are often instrumentalized as tools of communication that promote understanding of complex environmental processes, in this course, we will explore more diverse affordances of storytelling. We will focus, of instance, on how stories, sound, and performance transform ecological knowledge, theory, and imagination; how communal practices of story-sharing may model new research methods across the sciences and the humanities. In short, the school will focus on environmental storytelling across media—in literature, film, poetry, theater, sound, and transmedia projects—with explicit emphasis on aesthetics and ethics of collaboration and co-creation, community building, and engaged pedagogies.

During the five-day intensive course, we will explore several topics in environmental humanities—for instance, environmental injustice, biodiversity, resource extraction, sustainability, petrocultures, colonialism, permacrisis—through diverse theoretical and methodological prisms. We have enlisted local and international environmental humanities practitioners (scholars, artivists, educators) to facilitate workshops, lectures, field trips, sound walks, deep listening, and hands-on training sessions. Participants will also be invited to engage in practical, hands-on work to learn how to work ethically with aesthetics, ecologies, storytelling, and communities grounded in situated local and global contexts. This multilayered course format aims to promote public engagement, nonextractive practices of collaboration, and offer a space to develop and practice new narrative and analytical and transdisciplinary skills, with a nuanced understanding of several areas of EH inquiry.

Partners: NTNU (Department of Languages and Literature; Department of Teacher Education; Department of Music; Department of Art and Media Studies; NTNU Environmental Humanities Research Group; TransLit Research Group; Gjærevoll Centre) and Trondheim-based and international partners (Trondheim Literature House; Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art; Human Rights Institute, Binghamton University (SUNY); ANEST).