Explore our collection of series from The Otter showcasing collections of research and compilations of posts that illustrate projects of collective interest.
Winter in Canada
January 2024 – Ongoing – Edited by M. Blake Butler and Ben Bradley
This series brings winter to the forefront of Canadian environmental historiography.
Heritage Rivers in Canada
October 2023 – Ongoing – Edited by Ramya Swayamprakash
This series explores the following questions: What does it mean to be a heritage river in 2023? What does a designation mean/bring with it? How do these designations honour First Peoples? How are heritage rivers portrayed in Canadian media and public imageries? What is the future of heritage rivers?
Ghost Light II: Monstrosities
October – November 2023 – Edited by Caroline Abbott
The 2023 theme of this series aimed to problematise the notion of “monstrosity” in the environmental humanities in the interest of illuminating the relationships between other-than-human beings, folklore, and environment.
Environmental Histories of Foraging
August – October 2023 – Edited by Nicole Miller
This series highlights how balance between environmental well-being and human well-being is delicate, and shows how foraging proves to be a valuable point of departure from which we can observe how the scale seesaws back and forth between these endpoints.
Natural Allies
August 2023 – Edited by Daniel Macfarlane
This series highlights topics from Daniel Macfarlane’s book, Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations, published with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2023.
Scholars in Residence Series
July – August 2023 – Edited by Asad Jessani
This series highlights the experience of three undergraduate participants in the Scholars-in-Residence Program, undertaken annually at University of Toronto’s Victoria College. Combining the fascinating disciplines of natural sciences, mathematics and social sciences, the various projects aimed to foster creativity and solutions to unique challenges the world is facing today.
Yukon Environmental History: 125th Anniversary
July – August 2023 – Edited by Heather Green
This series investigates Yukon’s relationship with resources and environmental transformation to mark the 125th anniversary of the formal creation of the territory.
Arts-Based Research in the Anthropocene
June – July 2023 – Edited by Amrita DasGupta
This series explores the way in which arts-based research methodologies can help us better understand the Anthropocene epoch.
Emotional Ecologies
June – July 2023 – Edited by Jessica DeWitt and Sarah York-Bertram
The series explores the history of emotions and emotional futurity from an ecocritical and intersectional view.
RCMP at 150
May – June 2023 – Edited by Blair Stein
The series interrogates the establishment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on its 150th anniversary.
Energy and Power: Energy History Series
May 2023 – Edited by Andrew Watson and Ben Bradley
This series showcases undergraduate student research in energy history.
Digital Natural History
April – June 2023 – Edited by Heather Rogers and Nick Koenig
This series examines how different technologies can help us explore environmental humanities research in interactive and dynamic ways.
Ghost Light: Folkloric NonHumanity of the Environmental Stage
October – November 2022 – Edited by Caroline Abbott
The series investigates the relationships between non-human beings, folklore, and the environmental humanities.
Mega Dams
October 2022 – Edited by Lori Lee Oates
The series investigates mega dams and hydroelectric projects and their troubled history in Canada and in many parts of the world. Focused on how they perpetuate forms of neocolonialism, extractive economics, and the exploitation of Indigenous populations in the contemporary period.
Learning From and With Invasive Species: Pluralities, Refractions, Futures
August 2022 – Ongoing – Edited by Estraven Lupino-Smith
This series is concerned with how humans choose to relate to species perceived to be “out-of-place” as shaped by ontologies, socioeconomic context, place-based histories, and desires of knowing and belonging to the world.
Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North
Part I: August – September 2022; Part II – January – February 2023; Part III – September – October 2023 – Edited by Isabelle Gapp and Mark A. Cheetham
This three-part series regards interdisciplinary perspectives on the cultural, social, and environmental dynamics across Indigenous communities and settler populations in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, the Nordic countries, and Russia to examine the complex visual/textual cultures of this region.
Water Pedagogies
July – October 2022 – Edited by Sritama Chatterjee
This series tries to conceptualize the various possibilities of a robust water pedagogy in the classroom and beyond.
Succession II: Queering the Environment
June 2022 – Edited by Addie Hopes, Estraven Lupino-Smith, and Jessica DeWitt
This series explore topics related to unruliness, care, and pleasure. Succession II centers queer people, non-humans, systems, and ideas and explores their impact within the fields of environmental history, environmental humanities, and queer ecology.
Radiation in Canada
May – June 2022 – Edited by Joshua McGuffie
This series aims to understand the sundry environmental histories that make up Canada’s radioactive past and present (intersections between radioactivity, nature, and diverse peoples across Canada.
Fire Stories
August – September 2022 – Edited by Mica Jorgenson
This series revolves around encounters between environmental historians and wildfire, both in the archives and on the land.
Stuff Stories
July 2022 – Edited by Blair Stein
This series discusses how students and educators across Canada can think critically and carefully about the environments they might find themselves in over the summer, (engaging with the idea of “going outside.”)
Sights of Contestation
March 2022 – Edited by Jessica DeWitt
The series explores a variety of resistances, both material and discursive, found in current pipeline debates. The authors of this series focus on different sites of contestation—Keystone XL, Line 3, and the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project—to understand the role the unconscious, bodies, and images play in the perception of these infrastructures and their linkages.
Wood Buffalo National Park Report
November 2021 – March 2022 – Edited by Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Peter Fortna, Sabina Trimble, and Jessica DeWitt
The series is a community-led history-documentation of Wood Buffalo National Park and its violent relations with Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) and their ancestors.
History En Vélo
September – November 2021 – Edited by Claire Campbell and Jim Clifford
This series opens up a wider conversation with others who bike and who also think historically: not about the environmental/history of cycling, but how the experience of cycling feels to us, as an intellectual as well as a civic exercise, and how we fold it into our professional and personal lives.
Historians Confront the Climate Emergency
September – October 2021 – Edited by Edward Dunsworth and Daniel Macfarlane
This interdisciplinary series looks at scholar perceptions of the climate emergency and ways that historians are teaching climate in the classroom.
Parks and Profit
April – June 2021 – Edited by Jessica DeWitt
This series explores the complex relationship between profit and parks historically and in present-day.
Borders and Boundaries of the Canadian North
March – May 2021 – Edited by Heather Green and Jonathan Luedee
The series explores the diverse concepts of “borders” and “boundaries” in the Northern region of Canada (including, but not limited to, the Arctic and Subarctic regions) from any time period.
Whose Nature? Race and Canadian Environmental History
July 2020 – February 2021 – Edited by Sean Kheraj
This series explores a range of ways in which ideas of race have influenced the interactions between people and the rest of nature in Canada’s past.
Environmental Histories of the Future
March – June 2021 – Edited by Andrew Watson
This series features thoughts of scholars from the environmental humanities who explore how people in the past imagined and crafted their own environmental futures, and how our thinking about the environment in 2021 might shape the future.
Empire, Trees, Climate
March 2021 – Edited by Kirsten Greer and Andrew Watson
The series showcases the research coming out of three projects hosted at Nipissing University’s Centre for Understanding Semi-Peripheries (CUSP) and supported by Kirsten Greer, Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Histories and Geographies of the Semi-Peripheries.
Introduced
April 2020 – January 2021 – Edited by Jamie Murton and Andrew Watson
This series asks scholars to discuss their first encounters with environmental history and how it influenced their work.
HBC at 350
November – December 2020 – Edited by Blair Stein
This series explores the past three-and-a-half centuries of the Hudson’s Bay Company through an environmental lens.
Coastal Environmental History
August – September 2020 – Edited by Sara Spike
This series edited considers intersections of nature and culture along the saline shores of the land and tidewaters currently known as Canada, the country with the world’s longest coastline.
The Greater Gulf Preview Series
March 2020 – Edited by Claire Campbell
The series details excerpts from The Greater Gulf: Essays on the Environmental History of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in February 2020.
Outside Looking In
November – December 2020 – Edited by Claire Campbell and Daniel Macfarlane
This series discusses the experiences of teaching and researching Canadian environmental history by scholars from other countries.
The Group of Seven and the History of the Canadian Landscape
October 2020 – Edited by Daniel Macfarlane and Jessica DeWitt
This series reads the Group of Seven through an environmental history lens on the 100th anniversary of the art collective’s founding.
Environmental Humanities Research During COVID-19
July – September 2020 – Edited by Andrew Watson
This series examines approach to, or thoughts about, research and writing during the pandemic.
Succession: Queering the Environment
June 2020 – Edited by Jessica DeWitt
This series explores the changes that occur within environmental history and related environmental studies when queer people, non-humans, systems, and ideas are centred.
Eddies
April – July 2020 – Edited by Tina Edcock
Tina Adcock chats with fellow NiCHE editors on a topic (or topics) of their choosing that’s been on their mind lately.
Perennial Problems
January – March 2020 – Edited by Heather Green
This series exploring the intersections of environmental history and histories of health.
Unearthed
February 2019 – Ongoing – Edited by Heather Green, Justin Fisher, Blake Butler, Heather Rogers
This series edited by NiCHE New Scholars representatives features emerging environmental historians and environmental humanities scholars discussing what brought them to the field, why they value environmental research, and how it connects with life outside of academia.
Not Your Day Job
November 2019 – February 2020 – Edited by Claire Campbell
This series shares academics’ experiences using their training in the realm of public projects concerning the environment and nature.
From Coulees to Muskeg: A Saskatchewan Environmental History Series
October 2019 – Ongoing – Edited by Jessica DeWitt
This series is published in association with Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society and Folklore magazine and highlights aspects of Saskatchewan’s environmental history.
Get Outside! Field Trips & Teaching Environmental History
February – May 2019 – Edited by Claire Campbell
This series shares insights about field trips from different courses, to different places, and with different interests, from day excursions to full camping trips.
Environmental Historians Debate: Can Nuclear Power Solve Climate Change?
January – April 2019 – Edited by Daniel Macfarlane
This series investigates what environmental and energy historians can bring to discussions about nuclear power.
Material Realities of Energy Histories
January – February 2019 – Edited by Andrew Watson
This is a series of five blog posts highlighting the work published in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire (CJH/ACH) on the “Material Realities of Energy Histories.”
Environmental Humanities in the Public Realm
March – April 2019 – Edited by John Sandlos
This series is focused on environmental humanities and public engagement. These posts emerged from a workshop held at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Nexus Centre for Humanities and Social Science Research in May 2018 called, “Environmental Humanities in the Public Realm.”
Canopy
January – April 2019 – Tina Adcock
This series details leading environmental historians and historical geographers in and of Canada reflecting on the field’s past, present, and future, as well as their journeys into and through it.
Environmental History as Early Modern History
June – September 2018 – Edited by Claire Campbell
This series features scholarship from the early modern period – and queries the larger temporal character of the field of environmental history.
Canada’s Anthropocene
January 2018 – Edited by Alan MacEachern
This series examines permanent changes humans have had on nature and the role of Canada in the Anthropocene.
Soundings: New Approaches to History and Environment in Atlantic Canada
April 2018 – Edited by Claire Campbell
This is a series of articles jointly published by The Otter ~ la loutre and the Acadiensis Blog that considers new approaches to history and the environment in Atlantic Canada.
Rhizomes
October 2017 – December 2021 – Edited by Tina Adcock
This series highlights the experiences of environmental historians working beyond the professoriate.
Hope and Environmental History
June 2017 – Edited by Tina Adcock
This series explores hope and environmental history.
Seeds: New Research in Environmental History
August 2016 – July 2018 – Edited by Jessica DeWitt
This series serves to highlight new work being done in the field of environmental history and connect this research to other fields and contemporary issues.
Animal Metropolis Series
February 2017 – Jennifer Bonnell
The series emerges from contributors to Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada (University of Calgary Press, 2017). In each entry, the contributors use their own chapters as the basis for wider discussions about contemporary developments that highlight the complex interactions between humans and animals.
Dam Nation: Hydroelectric Developments in Canada
September 2016 – Edited by Daniel Macfarlane
This series attempts to answer some of these questions with the various authors’ perspectives: What explains the different dam trajectories in northern North America? Is Canada damned to be a nation of dams?
(Un)Natural Identities: Unearthing Gender in Environmental History
March – May 2016 – Edited by Tina Adcock
This series considers the intersection between environmental history and gender history.
Sustainable Farm Systems
October 2015 – January 2017 – Edited by Andrew Watson
This series showcases the work of the Sustainable Farm Systems project, an interdisciplinary, multi-national project examining the history of Western agriculture using a socioecological metabolism framework.
When Blue Meets Green: Labour and Environmental History
November 2015 – Edited by Tina Adcock
This series considers the intersection between environmental history and labour and working-class histories.
Landscapes of Science
January – August 2015 – Edited by Tina Adcock
This series considers the intersection between environmental history and the histories of science, technology, and medicine.
A Cold Kingdom: A Found Series
March 2016 – Edited by Tina Adcock
The series collects previously published posts that examine Canadians’ social, material, and imaginative engagements with winter, both in its quotidian and extreme forms