New Natures is happy to announce that the PhD level course

New Natures: Histories of Environment and Technology

will be offered in August 2016 through Luleå University of Technology. The instructor for the course will be Dr. Dolly Jørgensen. The course will award 7,5 hp under the Swedish higher education point system.

Goal

Humans are technological creatures. We harness nature for energy, food, protection, leisure, information, and meaning through the deployment of technologies. In so doing, we modify nature in countless ways. Focusing on these new natures allows histories to be written that take into account the complex relationship between nature and technology. The goal with the course is to investigate the historical linkages between environment and technology over time.

The focus is on literature identified as contributing to the field of “envirotech”, which bridges scholarship in the disciplines of history of technology and environmental history.

Organization

The course is organized around four meeting places of environment and technology: water, animals, urban areas, and mega-projects. The course is designed for PhD level students as a literature course in which the student reads the literature each week for four weeks of full time study.

There will be an online discussion forum each week on Monday morning for two hours in which the students are expected to participate in order to share experiences and ideas prompted by the reading. Students will need to have access to a computer with web camera and headset (earphones + microphone) to participate.

Examination

The examination is written and consists of four book reviews. Writing a good book review is a real world skill that professional historians need to master. The student will write one book review for each theme week (choosing one of the two books if two are assigned that week). Two of the reviews must be written in a style suitable for publication in the journal Environmental History (i.e. aimed at environmental historians as the readers); the other two must be written for publication in the journal Technology and Culture (i.e. aimed at historians of technology). See each journal’s guidelines for book reviews for information on the acceptable length, style, and contents.

http://newnatures.org/course/phd-course-new-natures-histories-of-environment-and-technology/

Registration

The course is free. To register, send an email to Dolly Jørgensen at dolly.jorgensen@ltu.se