Heritage and Environmental Engagement (PEH322)

Content

The class will grapple with how we can tell meaningful narratives of human-nature relationships in a rapidly changing world. Museums and other heritage sites are sites of storytelling and can thus be a vehicle for engaging the public with complex environmental challenges. Environmental humanities insights through foundational concepts such as care, entanglement, hybridity, and multispecies worlds can play a vital role for heritage sites trying to tell these stories. The course will provide students with broad professional insights into how preservation, collection, and display practices within the heritage sector (including at museums, archives, galleries, and industrial sites) intersect with environmental challenges. The course will examine how different environmental ethics and ideologies affect the development of different heritage practices. It examines dominant ideas, policy frameworks and documents, and concrete sustainability initiatives in heritage management from an environmental humanities perspective. Students will be exposed to different digital exhibition techniques and platforms. The course gives students an opportunity to jointly curate a digital exhibition.

Learning outcome

A candidate who has completed and passed the course

Knowledge

• has specialized insight into the environmental contexts of heritage practices
• can apply knowledge from environmental humanities to contemporary heritage exhibitions and displays
• has knowledge of how the heritage industry has engaged with environmental issues through their policies and practices

Skills

• can analyze and deal critically with various sources of information and use them to structure and formulate scholarly arguments about how heritage sites can meaningfully engage their audiences with environmental challenges
• can analyze existing interpretations in heritage practice and apply environmental humanities understandings to those practices

General Competence

• can communicate writing about heritage and environmental themes to the general public
• can contribute to new thinking and innovation processes by creatively developing an advanced public-facing output in a group setting

Required prerequisite knowledge

None

Recommended prerequisites

PEH310 Key Issues in Environmental History

Exam

Coursework requirements

Field trips 100% attendance, Workshops 75% attendance

Course teacher(s)

Course teacher:

Eike-Christian Heine

Course teacher:

Dolly Jørgensen

Course coordinator:

Marie-Theres Fojuth

Open for

• Master’s Program in Public Environmental Humanities
• Inbound exchange students at master’s level

The applicant must meet the admission requirements for the study programmes the course is open to.

Literature