One of EcoCultureLab’s “lines of effort” is “research and critical practice.” But, like a lot of what we do, we define research expansively and somewhat creatively. “Research” comes from the Old French recercher, "to seek out, to search closely" (re + cercher, "to seek for"), and ultimately from the Latin circare, "go about, wander, traverse," which in Late Latin meant "to wander hither and thither," from circus "circle" (see circus). Research as a kind of circuitous wandering about a subject, a wandering circus.
UVM largely equates research with "scholarship," to include the creative arts alongside the kinds of things that universities normally consider research. A few years ago some faculty in the UVM Environmental Program (myself included) engaged in an exercise defining what we consider “scholarship.” Building on the work of others, we concluded that scholarship encompassed “five domains of scholarly work: scholarship of discovery, which builds new knowledge through traditional “basic research”; scholarship of integration, which connects across disciplines or discourses, reinterprets and/or recontextualizes topics, or provides novel illuminations of knowledge; scholarship of application and engagement, which aids society or professions in addressing problems, as in applied and translational sciences, action research, and community engaged praxis; scholarship of creativity, which communicates knowledge and insight through creative arts practice; and scholarship of teaching and learning, which innovates pedagogically to transform and extend knowledge and its generation."
With the general idea of providing a venue for discussing our own research (and scholarly) practice, EcoCultureLab has initiated a series of “Research Raps” — open sessions, held every other Friday through the semester (1:30-2:45 pm), to chat about themes and topics of interest to faculty, grad students, and others engaged in research, broadly defined, that’s loosely situated at the confluence of environment, humanities, and the creative arts. The focus will sometimes be selected/curated readings, and sometimes a guest speaker. Locations may be variable, so check the community calendar for details.
Dates and topics for the next series of weeks are as follows.
Feb. 7 - Environmental Humanities: What is it? Why now? What's missing?
Feb. 21 - Media & Environment: Discussion and UVM launch of the new journals Media+Environment (open-access and co-sponsored by EcoCultureLab) and Journal of Environmental Media, introduced by the co-editor of the first (and editorial board member of the second)
Mar. 6 - BSD (Beyond Standard Data): Incorporating dreams, emotions, sensuality, and other transgressive data into our research
Mar. 20 - Decolonizing 'Environment' (and Humanities): What's the big deal?
Apr. 3 - Informal research share
Apr. 17 - Discard Studies & the Plasticene: The political, industrial, epistemic, and ontological ecologies of waste
To be on the mailing list for readings, please e-mail ecoculture@uvm.edu.
