Resources for ENVS Topics

Overview of resources

We have assembled bibliographic resources into an ENVS topics glossary (see below), which you may use as you define your ENVS concentrations, do a course-related project, or work on your capstone. These are just starter resources!: you will find more on your own. Here are the primary resources we consulted:

• Annual Review of Environment & Resources
• Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics & Philosophy
• International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
• Keywords for Environmental Studies
• Oxford Bibliographies Online
  • Environmental Science
  • Geography
  • International Relations
  • Philosophy
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The ENVS topics glossary

The ENVS topics glossary includes roughly 80 topics of interest to ENVS students, and links to a wide range of primarily OBO resources. These resources will get you started in exploring scholarship on your topic, and help you identify key questions; we encourage you to choose topics from this list as they are better documented than topics you may define on your own. The glossary is also designed to help you approach your topic of interest in a situated, interdisciplinary manner, by organizing each under one of six categories based in part on Robert Sack’s diagram of place at right (see Sack 1990):

• Nature: Topics primarily involving biological, chemical, geological, and other processes shaping a place as understood via the natural sciences.
• Social relations: Topics primarily involving economic, political, social, and other processes shaping a place as understood via the social sciences.
• Meaning: Topics primarily involving aesthetic, cultural, historical, and other processes shaping a place as understood via the arts and humanities.
• Hybrids: Topics that mix processes of nature, social relations, and meaning in place-specific ways.
• Places: Gatherings of processes (“forces” in Sack’s diagram) and perspectives, as grounded in one or more geographical locations.
• Perspectives: Ways of knowing (e.g., a place), broadly spanning views from somewhere (local, contextual) to views from nowhere (global, universal).

Nature, social relations, and meaning are disciplinary categories representing common divisions of scholarship into natural sciences, social sciences, and arts & humanities. Topics under these categories function like your ENVS breadth courses. As Sack’s diagram suggests, however, reality comes at us in a hybrid, mixed-up manner, where nature, social relations, and meaning mix in the situated context of particular places, and are understood via a range of perspectives. Our ENVS core courses emphasize hybrids, places, and the perspectives necessary to understand them.

As you explore topics of interest to you, we encourage you to mix them! These categories will help you do this. You’ll find it fun to explore your topics of interest in this new way via the ENVS topics glossary.

Feel free to fill out this feedback form to help us improve the ENVS topics glossary.

Examples

Here are five examples of broad concentration or project interests, and some recommended glossary topics for each. (Note that, for each, an area studies topic may also be relevant given your situated context.)

References