Languages and Environments Reading Group

Convened by Daniel Finch-Race (Ca’ Foscari), Kasia Mika (QMUL) and Nicola Thomas (Bristol)

This reading group will explore environments across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries. We will meet online, once every two months.

Participants will be invited to reflect on tensions between – on the one hand – needing a lingua franca for such research and – on the other hand – valuing non-Anglophone terms, discourses, and cultures in ways that move beyond dominant linguistic hierarchies and colonising forces.

Matters for discussion will include: what would help to foreground the value of working across languages in the context of environmental concerns? What landmark environmental studies have occurred in languages other than English? What are some particularly inspiring collaborations about environmental matters involving multiple languages and disciplines? What could a multilingual and multidisciplinary approach to environmental issues achieve?

The organisers warmly welcome all interested in discussing approaches to languages and environments, and the languages of environmental research, including graduate students, early career academics, and activists and practitioners working outside of academia.

The first text we'll discuss as part of this reading group is Natalie Eppelsheimer, Uwe Küchler and Charlotte Melin's 'Claiming the Language Ecotone: Translinguality, Resilience, and the Environmental Humanities', Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2014). The text can be accessed at the following link

Download guidance on participating in an online event.