With the opening of a new academic year comes the return of the NiCHE New Scholars Committee – a sub-group of NiCHE that connects environmental history grad students, postdoctoral fellows, and recent PhD graduates. As in previous years, the NiCHE New Scholars Committee will be running a series of meetings/discussions via Google Hangouts on topics and trends in environmental history. Our goal is to facilitate connections between emerging scholars separated by institutional, national, and geographical barriers.
I’m thrilled to serve as the 2016/17 New Scholar’s Representative and to work with the Committee to bring together environmental historians from across the continent. What can New Scholars look forward to this year? In October, Anne Janhunen will lead a discussion on parks history. We also have upcoming meetings on Northern environmental history, environmental/historical writing, and digital methods in environmental history.
This September, I am kicking off this year’s discussions with a topic close to my heart – the Environmental History of Mining.
We will address questions like:
- How can new scholars differentiate themselves from the large body of pre-existing mining literature?
- Does mining history fit as a sub-discipline of Environmental History? How effectively has the established mining literature integrated with the environmental field? As scholars how can we effectively manage the intersections between mining history and economic/scientific/social/political history?
- How do we deal with the prevalence of nationalism and myth-making in mining history?
- Can/should mining history inform contemporary debates about the extraction industries? How can scholars best serve mining communities?
Suggested readings:
- Liza Piper, Chapter 5 “Sub / Terrain” in The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (UBC Press, 2009): 140-164.
- Kent Curtis, “Introduction: Arsenic in the Wilderness, or Knowing Nature through Mining,” in Gambling on Ore: The Nature of Metal Mining in the United States 1860-1910 (University Press of Colorado, 2013): 1-14.
- John Sandlos and Arn Keeling, Zombie Mines and the (Over)Burden of History, The Solutions Journal Vol. 4, Issue 3 (2013).
The discussion is will take place within the last two weeks of September. Contact me ASAP for a link to the Doodle Poll.
We want YOU to be a part of NiCHE New Scholars! If you would like to be a part of any of the above events, would like to get added to the NiCHE New Scholars mailings list, or, better yet, want to lead a future NiCHE New Scholars discussion, don’t hesitate to send me a note!
Mica Jorgenson:
Email: jorgenma@mcmaster.ca
Twitter: @mica_amy
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