2024: NiCHE’s Year in Images and Multimedia

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2024 was NiCHE’s seventh year on Instagram. Managing our Instagram account is a lot different from our other social media accounts. A focus on the visual and, to a lesser extent, audio aspects of our site’s content leads to new and unique aspects of the material coming to the forefront. It also leads to a different kind of engagement with our readers and followers and draws new people into environmental history content.

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Our “Top Nine” on Instagram is more than a statistical analysis of our digital popularity; it is an indication of the topics and images that resounded the most with our audience and a chance to look back on the past year. Let’s take one last look back at last year through our nine most-popular images and media from 2024:

#9: The Announcement Banner for the Environmental Art History Roundtable

Chaired by our editor Isabelle Gapp and Hans Hönes, our Environmental Art History Roundtable, cosponsored by the Art History Department at the University of Aberdeen, took place during Environmental History Week in April. Foregrounding the interdisciplinarity of art history and visual culture and following on from an in-person roundtable at ASEH 2024 in Denver, this virtual roundtable aimed to revitalise discussions around art in environmental history and actively encourage environmental historians and humanists to intentionally engage with artwork and visual media, not simply as illustrations but as important and necessary primary sources. You can watch the recording here.

Environmental Art History Panel

#8: Photo of St Clements and Romney Sheep

This image of St. Clements Church and Romney sheep, taken by Brian Fuller, was the feature image for “Healing and Ruling in Medieval England’s Wetlands” by Claudia Moreira Calzadilla and Nina Witteman. Part of our Wetland Wednesday series, the authors show that medieval wetlands, such as Romney Marsh in southeast England, were complex liminal spaces with conflicting meanings, serving both as sites of medicinal resources and as politically contested landscapes. While local communities utilized plants like marsh mallow and mosquito plant for healing, kings and religious authorities drained and cultivated these lands to assert control, reshape ecosystems, and demonstrate power, leading to significant ecological and societal transformations.

Two sheep pasturing in front of a church and running water.

#7: DeWitt Modeling our 20th Anniversary T-Shirt

Our editor, Caroline Abbott, designed a set of merchandise to mark our 20th Anniversary. In this photo, I am modeling one of the t-shirt designs. You can still get one of these in your closet (for now) by visiting our merchandise shop.

Jessica DeWitt modeling the 20th anniversary collection NiCHE t-shirt

#6: The cover of Joy Parr’s Sensing Change

This cover was featured in Jessica van Horssen’s tribute to Parr, who passed away in the spring of 2024. You can read the full tribute, “Sensing (everything) Changes: A Tribute to Joy Parr,” here.

Sensing Changes by Joy Parr cover

#5: A Photo of Fog Along the Coast of Atlantic Canada

This photo of fog, taken by Sara Spike, is featured in her 2020 post, “‘a salubrious, saline exhalation’: Fog and Health in Colonial Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.” Part of Spike’s Coastal History series, the post shows that in the 18th and 19th centuries, European settlers and visitors to Atlantic Canada attempted to reconcile the region’s dense coastal fogs with prevailing miasma theories of disease, speculating about their benign origins and healthful effects compared to harmful freshwater fogs.

fog along the coast of atlantic canada

#4: Photograph From Michelle Ferreira’s Eco-empathy Project

Eco-empathy: a photographic exploration of solastalgia “is a photographic series that reflects on the felt response to the human-induced climate change in our present Anthropocene era.” In February 2024, we featured a selection of Ferreira’s stunning and thought-provoking images from the project. Produced in collaboration with her daughter, Eco-Empathy was inspired by her daughter’s hopes and fears for the future.

A young girl at a beach holds up a mirror as an exploration in solastalgia

#3: Excerpt from “Queering Ecofeminism”

“Queering Ecofeminism: Towards an Anti-Far-Right Environmentalism” by Asmae Ourkiya is our fifth most-read article of all-time! And excerpts from this article, like this one, continue to capture the attention of readers.

#2: Call for Papers for Succession III: Queering the Environment – Rebellion

The third biannual installment of our Succession: Queering the Environment series was published in the summer of 2024. Series editors Estraven Lupino-Smith, Addie Hopes Vincent, and myself asked contributors to explore ideas of queer rebellion as interruption and resistance. You can explore the entire series here.

#1: Our Announcement That Our Annual Business Meeting at CHA Was Cancelled

In June, we decided to cancel our annual environmental history business meeting at the Canadian Historical Association at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Montreal. NiCHE decided to cancel the meeting in solidarity with students protesting the killing of Palestinians and law faculty on strike at McGill University. 

As host of the Canadian Historical Association environmental history business meeting at the upcoming Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Montreal, NiCHE has decided to cancel the meeting in solidarity with students protesting the killing of Palestinians and law faculty on strike at McGill University.
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Jessica DeWitt

is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States, editor, project manager, and digital communications strategist. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Saskatchewan in 2019. She is an executive member, editor-in-chief, and social media editor for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). She is the Managing Editor for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. She is also President of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, a Girls Rock Saskatoon board member, and a Coordinating Team member of Showing Up for Racial Justice Saskatoon-Treaty Six. A passionate social justice advocate, she focuses on developing digital techniques and communications that bridge the divide between academia and the general public in order to democratize knowledge access. You can find out more about her and her freelance services at jessicamdewitt.com.

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