Digital Commons Network^™

Blood Engulfs The Green Earth”: An Ecocritical Reading Of Rasha Fadhlil’S Ishtar In Baghdad And Amy Merrill’S In The Reeds, Maysoon Taher Muhi

Uruk Journal of Human Sciences

In recent times, ecological studies have increasingly been employed to promote environmental awareness across various disciplines and regions worldwide. This paper specifically focuses on the repercussions of war and political violence on Iraq's ecology, which has been greatly impacted by conflict. Two noteworthy plays, Ishtar in Baghdad by Iraqi writer Rasha Fadhlil and In the Reeds by American writer Amy Merrill, shed light on this topic. Both plays, which primarily center on Iraq, underscore that those who fail to appreciate and value human life cannot possibly regard nonhuman entities with reverence. Fadhlil effectively employs elements from Mesopotamian mythology to draw …

Humanities In The Time Of Chatgpt And Other Forms Of Ai, Puspa Damai, Barbara Postema

Critical Humanities

Humanities in the time of ChatGPT and other forms of AI

Review Of Empire And Environment: Ecological Ruin In The Transpacific., Hanyue Li

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A Book Review on Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific.

Green Is The New Black: Exploring How A Philosophical Approach To The Fashion Industry Will Reduce Its Environmental Impact, Darion A. Gibbs

Student Theses and Dissertations

The fashion industry is the third largest contributor to pollution globally, behind only oil and agriculture. It also accounts for one-fifth of the plastic produced annually. Despite its impact, it is hard to trace accountability. For example, mega-retailers often outsource production to developing countries, without strong structures of accountability for their environmental impact. In addition, companies often claim to be environmentally sustainable, but it is easy to inflate the truth, and entities designed to protect consumers have limited enforcement. In this context, who should be held responsible for the fashion industry’s contribution to climate change?

In response, this thesis delves …

How Are Oregon's Rural Indigenous Communities Overcoming Water Access Issues?, Tyren John Thompson

Dissertations and Theses

This study investigates how water insecurity affects Indigenous communities in Grand Ronde, Warm Springs, and Umatilla, Oregon, through loss of clean drinking water, access to culturally significant foods, and exposure to pollution. Each community offers innovative solutions drawing on their Indigenous knowledge to overcome water supply challenges. Communities with more resources are better equipped to cope with water insecurity and environmental degradation.

A Call For Change: Minnesota Environmental Justice Heroes In Action, Volume 2, Christie Manning, Minori Kishi, Rachel Campbell

Books

Access Online: https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/environmentaljusticevol2/

This second volume of “A Call for Change: Minnesota Environmental Justice Heroes in Action” is a collection of the stories and efforts of environmental justice activists at the forefront of the Minnesota environmental justice movement. It is a compilation of interviews, conducted by students at Macalester College in 2023, to understand the layers of environmental injustice in Minnesota and bring attention to the resilience and determination of activists and communities. See volume one at https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/environmentaljustice/

Assessing The Sustainable Development Dimensions Of Environmental Public Policies For Protected Natural Areas In Mexico: A 1970-2018 Perspective, Cielo María Ávila López, José Israel Herrera

Journal of Maya Heritage

Abstract: This abstract discusses the challenges and issues related to the implementation of Environmental Public Policies (EPP) for Protected Natural Areas (PNA) in Mexico from 1970 to 2018. EPPs aim to achieve sustainable development by balancing economic, environmental, and social dimensions while reconciling conservation and the use of natural resources with restrictions on their use and economic compensation to communities. However, the results of this study reveal that the establishment of PNA has been unilateral and without consensus, leading to limitations on communities' use of the environment without granting them economic compensation or productive alternatives. This has resulted in conflicts …

Jaepl - Volume 28, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Full Issue of The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning Volume 28.

Vol. 59 No. 3 - Whole No. 402, Megan Abrahamson

Mythprint

Mythprint is the quarterly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local discussion groups.

Experiential Humanitiesx

DePaul Magazine

DePaul University's HumanitiesX program promotes project-based learning through innovative community collaborations.

Full Issue: Fall 2023

DePaul Magazine

In DePaul Magazine's fall 2023, President Robert L. Manuel unveils his Designing DePaul road map to position the university for monumental impact. We also highlight an innovative program that merges law and tech, an initiative centering humanities in collaborative, community-based interactions, and the ascendance of soprano Janai Brugger (SOM '05) on the international opera stage.

Queering Ecology: Three Investigations From Indigenous Women In Post-Conflict North Sumatra, Perdana Roswaldy

Antropologi Indonesia

Feminists and environmental scholars draw connections between gender inequality, heterosexism, and the devastating impact of environmental catastrophes on the livelihoods of women and gender minorities, exacerbating their precarity. This body of scholarship has begun to imagine alternatives to patriarchal gender and heterosexual norms for reconciling the relationship between humans and nature by calling for "queer(ing) ecology." I investigate the possibility of queering ecology by posing three theoretical concerns in opposition to anthropocentric and gendered preconceptions about nature: its idleness, naturality, and rightfulness. Respectively, I will dissect such presumptions by questioning nature as metaphors, investigating "the natural" attribute in nature, and …

Global Goals, Local Future Stories: Unpacking Contrasts And Visions Of Circular Economy Activities In Neighbourhood Makerspaces, María Laura Ramírez Galleguillos, Damla Çay, Aykut Coşkun

IASDR Conference Series

Circular makerspaces have the potential to contribute to sustainable development goals (SDGs) by promoting circular-making activities such as reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling. However, community building is essential for maintaining a circular makerspace, which requires engaging the makers and future users in circular-making activities. In this paper, we argue that involving locals in the design of circular makerspaces can facilitate community building and support makers' sense of belonging to the space. We present the experience of involving citizens in establishing circular makerspaces in seven European cities as part of the EU-funded H2020 project, [Project Name]. We developed a technique, called …

[Changing] Ecosystems, Carlo Vezzoli, Cindy Kohtala, Valentina Rognoli, Camilo Ayala Garcia

IASDR Conference Series

This paper presents a review and critical analysis of papers submitted for the Ecosystems Track of the Life-Changing Design conference, which focused on "Changing Ecosystems" through design for sustainability. The conference track aimed to explore the multifaceted dimensions of sustainability and its connection to design practice, research, and education. The papers covered various subthemes, including products and product design, Sustainable Product-Service Systems, craft, materials, aesthetics, more-than-human design, biodesign, and the role of designers as actors in society influencing policy, local-global dynamics, place-making, strategy-setting, and stakeholder interactions. Through synthesising the findings and insights from these papers, this review aims to provide …

Aqueous Logics: Towards A Hydro Feminism Approach To Sustainability, Beatrice Maggipinto, Valentina Nisi, Sarah Fox, Nuno Nunes, Tom Ainsworth

IASDR Conference Series

In the popular imagination, sustainability is often synonymous with environmentalism, but it encapsulates much more. While environmentalism and conservation are often a focal point of sustainability efforts, so too are the people who impact the environment through their actions and associated activism. In this paper, we examine the discourse on sustainability, nature conservation and climate change. We focus, in particular, on the relationship between humans and the seas, where three main topics entangle: eco-feminism, ocean conservation and well-being. This paper highlights its implications for research on sustainability, nature conservation and climate change by outlining an aqueous logic — a fluid …

Provi – A Transforming Vision Emerging From Reflective Practice, Pierre Lévy, Caroline Hummels

IASDR Conference Series

Over the past decades, design education has embraced notions related to self-directed learning, reflective practices, and lifelong learning. This perspective has led to the creation of various resources for design education and design practice, among which the Personal Development Plan which has played a central role in the ID Competence Framework at the ID Department of Eindhoven University of Technology. Over nearly 15 years of use, we propose an “updated” version of the PDP to strengthen its benefits from a programmatical and methodological perspective. The updated version, named Projected Vision (ProVi), is composed of five elements to structure a reflective …

Design For Social Imagination, Qian Sun, Mary Loveday

IASDR Conference Series

This paper reports findings from a research project, ‘Connecting Roots’, funded by the AHRC UK. Based on the learning from delivering six co-creation workshops to local communities, this paper discusses how design can be applied to support communities to collaboratively imagine future possibilities of health and wellbeing. It sits within the context of scaling up nature and nature based activities (e.g. park runs, community gardens) as a non-clinical approach for better health and wellbeing. These workshops aimed to address the challenge of inequality of access focusing on Walsall, a metropolitan borough in the UK exhibiting some extremes of deprivation, a …

Reimagining Design Education: Renewal And Transformation, Elena Caratti, Silvia Ferraris, Silke Lange, Yingchun Zang

IASDR Conference Series

We live in a time when change is happening globally to an unprecedented extent. The awareness of the phenomena underpins the current discourse and research activities in design and design education. Many design educators understand the demand for change and are looking for new strategies to respond to it. The challenge is how to transform and renew design disciplines and its learning processes so that the next generation of designers can actively and responsibly promote change. Some educators are already focusing on the dimensions of change, namely, contemporary issues such as climate change and sustainable goals. Others are reflecting on …

Environmental Loss, Displacement, And Anxiety In Portugal: Analyzing News Articles To Differentiate Manifestations Of Environmental Distress, Robin Greene

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Expressions of environmental distress can take different forms, with different symptoms, causes, and treatments. Existing literature generally identifies three primary categories of environmental distress responses: environmental grief, solastalgia, and eco-anxiety. This paper explores these distinctions and identifies words typically associated with each category in Portuguese news articles using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). LDA is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that groups words into topics and identifies connections between those words based on how often those words appear together in sequences. This paper uses a modified LDA algorithm called GuidedLDA to identify additional keywords within topics defined by a list …

Does Renewable Electricity Promote Indigenous Sovereignty? Reviewing Support, Barriers, And Recommendations For Solar And Wind Energy Development On Native Lands In The United States, Corrie Grosse, Brigid Mark

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

Native lands in what is called the United States have vast renewable energy resources. If focused on advancing sovereignty and self-determination, renewable energy development could alleviate harm from ongoing processes of settler colonialism and from the climate crisis, experienced by Native peoples first and worst. However, Native peoples benefit very little from existing renewable energy projects. To increase understanding on how renewable energy can better support Native sovereignty, this paper provides a systematic literature review of 74 articles published between 2003 and 2023 on Native peoples' involvement in wind and solar electricity in the United States. We find that existing …

Fauna As Fieldworkers: An Analysis On The Use Of Animals As A Form Of Organic Weed And Pest Management In Modern Viticulture, Mariana Del Carmen Campano

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Recent data on the current state of pesticide use in global agriculture suggests serious concerns over significant overuse and negative effects on both environmental and human health, and current trends only suggest continued increases in future global pesticide use. Without prompt, large-scale intervention, this global abuse of chemical pesticides spells significant threats of not only continued harm to global health and environmental quality, but also to the long term viability of agricultural lands and the growing threat of pesticide resistant insects and weeds. Various methods have been explored in the realm of integrated pest management (IPM), but a current lack …

“Nararampag Nga Mga Takna . . . Nangangaliding Nga Mga Higayon”: Memory, Nostalgia, Love, And Loss In Victor Sugbo’S Taburos Han Dagat, Jessa A. Amarille

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This paper explores how the concepts of memory, nostalgia, love, and loss are depicted in the poems 1) “Ha Akon Paglinakaton,” (In My Travels[1]), 2) “May Ada Panahon” (There Comes a Time), 3) “Parada Han mga Sinya” (The Parade of Zinnias), 4) “An Pagdumdum” (On Recalling), 5) “Kawarayan” (Emptiness), 6) “Agurang Mundo” (Old Mundo), 7) “Taburos Han Dagat” (Sea Spray), 8) “La Madonna Alegro,” and 9) “Cadena de Amor” from Victor N. Sugbo’s Taburos Han Dagat (2014) using an ecocritical lens. Published in a post-Haiyan context, the poems may be classified as belonging to the ecopoetry genre with …

If We Were Fiction: Insect-Human Stories, Isabella Delaney

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This creative project delves into the nonlinear, interconnected web of insect-human relations in Nepal. Through exploring humans’ perceptions and stories of insects, this work intends to remedy the limits of traditional entomological knowledge, which forgets the ubiquitous reality of insects as more than biological and ecological agents. Insects are social, economic, and ethical “characters” in our lives, and recognizing this opens up possibilities for connection, hope, and evolution in this world. The potential of the mundane, the forgettable, pulses within humans’ unique attitudes toward insects and the forces that shaped them. This potential is represented in the final product of …

White Politics, Black Lives, & The Cost Of Being Green: Environmental Racism In Emelle, Alabama, Laura M. Wilson

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

In the 1970s, Emelle, Alabama welcomed the establishment of a new corporation and the promise of new economic opportunities. The small settlement, almost exclusively African-American (94%) and in poverty (67%) was selected by Waste Management, Inc., after lobbying by Governor George Wallace to create the largest hazardous waste landfill in the US. When a state policy change significantly increasing costs, production slowed, jobs dissipated (from 430 to 250), and destitution returned. At the same time, other problems began to the surface, including water contamination and increasing rates of childhood cancers, attributable to the toxic seepage. The dump still operates, but …

Scents Of Place: Exploring Self, Place And Planet Through Botanical Fragrance, Jennifer L. Kitson, Donna M. Sweigart

Open Educational Resources

This learning module provides instructors with an experiential field guide for introducing students to the United Nations Inner Development Goals Framework through self-guided mindful smelling activities and reflection prompts related to botanical fragrance. The interdisciplinary nature of this module allows for use or adaptation in a wide range of courses looking for outdoor, place-based and self-guided experiential learning to explore the role of botanical fragrance for people, plants and pollinators. The overarching goal is to deepen students’ connections to their senses (and scents) of self, place and planet through exploring botanical fragrance with mindful smelling. The learning activities in this …

Staging Nature: Performing Environmental Crises In War, Housing, And Labor, 1935–1990, Erik Barrett Wallenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Staging Nature” examines how theater was used as a means for expressing environmental concerns in moments of environmental crisis in the United States. I begin with The Federal Theatre Project’s national tour of a performance addressing the metabolic rift in the divide between the city and country with a focus on the devastation of farmland in the Dust Bowl in the late 1930s. At the heart of the dissertation are three theater groups that start in the 1960s during the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chapters on Bread and Puppet Theater show that they make a name for themselves …

Untenable Spaces And Inconceivable Futures In The 21st Century Anglophone Indian Novel, Shoumik Bhattacharya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As the world sours on the history-ending narratives of forever “growth” and unending “development” and recognizes the climate catastrophe, what stories of the future are left? The question of postcolonial space and its representation is a central concern of this dissertation. Thinking beyond the reasons for, and the histories of, the trashing of postcolonial space, examined by thinkers such as Rob Nixon and Jennifer Wenzel, allows for a consideration of the possibilities of life and thriving in unexpected and supposedly untenable contexts. I will therefore focus on what might be considered deterritorialised spaces: that is, spaces outside the structural ambits …

Ecological Solidarity And Sustainable Development In Africa, Ambrose Esigbemi Umetietie

The Journal of Social Encounters

Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own ... This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life (Maathai, 2010). According to John Paul II, the “threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness - both individual and collective - are contrary to the order of creation, an order …

Justice House At Niagara University: An Emerging Approach To Teaching Vincentian Social Justice During And After The Covid-19 Pandemic, Kevin A. Hinkley

Journal of Vincentian Social Action

Some commentators have predicted that the disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will transform the landscape of higher education in the United States. For example, Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, predicts that most U.S. colleges and universities will either “go out of business or become a shadow of themselves.” Professor Galloway argues that the few elite universities that survive will enter into corporate partnerships with Big Tech companies such as Google, Apple, and Meta. From this perspective, for the overwhelming majority of U.S. colleges and universities there won’t be a “post-pandemic recovery”— at least …

The Role Of Justice In Colombia’S Renewable Energy Transition: Wind Energy Development In Wayúu Territory, Adriana P. Fajardo Mazorra

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Amidst the defining issue of our time – climate change – the world faces an imperative to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, aligning with the 2015 Paris Agreement goals. This global focus on low-carbon energy infrastructure has brought forth local socio-environmental conflicts, and at the heart of this transition lies La Guajira, a peninsula in northern Colombia, home to the indigenous Wayúu people and abundant wind energy resources. This research delves into the critical role of energy justice as large-scale wind energy projects expand in La Guajira. By examining the struggles faced by the Wayúu people provoked by …