November 6, 2024
Blue Humanities
This past month, the Sustainability and Environmental Justice (SEJ) Collective’s first co-curricular field trips sent students, staff, and faculty far and wide. On this Blue Humanities trip, students had the opportunity to view the Oregon Coast through the lens of environmental humanities (EH). This event was a collaboration between two EH classes, Sarah Wagner-McCoy’s “Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll” and Shivani Sud’s “Oceans, Rains, Rivers, Pools: Histories of Water.” Thirty students traveled to the ocean, situating their classroom learning in its ecological environment; they scanned the horizon with binoculars for migrating whales, taking on the role of the characters in Melville’s novel, and discussed the separation between the ocean as an entity and its fictional and artistic representations.
Over fall break, students from Juniper Harrower’s environmental art class and several art majors embarked on a field trip to explore art and ecology. The trip included visits to museums featuring exhibitions in the PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, focused on themes of culture, climate, and justice.
The class then engaged with Harrower's own exhibition, Desert Forest: Life With Joshua Trees, at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, which explores the intersection of art and conservation. The trip concluded with fieldwork examining Joshua tree roots, which not only provided data for Juniper's research, but also an opportunity for students to respond to Joshua trees with scientific and artistic methods.