Raihan Rahman is a third-year PhD student who specializes in Environmental Humanities (EH), a field where environmental questions and concerns are studied through humanities methods and perspectives. EH helps scholars consider social, cultural, political, moral, and ethical dimensions of changes in the physical world.
You earned a BSc in Electrical Engineering and then studied Literature and Cultural Studies for your master's degree. How did you get involved in Environmental Humanities?
I did not know about EH when I began my MA. But I have always been environmentally conscious, caring about environmental degradation, climate change, and the health of other forms of life and non-life. My engagement with the environment, at that time, was from the position of an activist, not as an academic researcher.
One of my professors in Bangladesh introduced me to the works of Marxist environmental thinkers like John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, and Jason W. Moore. That was my introduction to environmental thinking from disciplines other than science. Then, my reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement made me more engaged in thinking about the climate question through literature. I realized literature has a role to play in grappling with the unprecedented planetary crisis we are facing.
Literature represents reality, imagines and anticipates possible futures, and creatively communicates crises. Literature evokes emotional responses that range from recognizing the crisis with considerable urgency to inspiring people to social and political activism. EH bridged my interest in literature and my concerns for the environment.
Is there an aspect of Environmental Humanities you are most interested in?
I am particularly interested in the politics of/in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the proposed new epoch in the geological history of the planet that acknowledges that humans have become a geophysical force, now changing the geologic and planetary processes of Earth.
The Anthropocene unsettles existing political modalities and institutions. In this context, we need re-energized political imaginations to envision and build a possible habitable and emancipatory future.
I want to explore the emergence of political imaginations to confront the Anthropocene crises and political subjectivities to resist their oppressive possibilities. My work aims for a mediation between theory and literature to investigate the Anthropocene.
Earlier this year, you presented your work at the Anthropocene Lab's “Thinking the Earth” seminar. What was that about?
The Anthropocene Lab is an interdisciplinary collaboration of UMass Amherst scholars from science, humanities, social science, and fine arts to explore and examine Anthropocene narratives. The “Thinking the Earth” seminar series allows faculty and graduate students to share their research.
I presented on the political imaginations in the Anthropocene — envisioning new political arrangements to transcend the existing political reality and confront the challenges of the Anthropocene in order to establish justice.
I elaborated on why we need to expand the scales of justice in terms of spatiality and temporality and extend the scope of justice to non-human entities and future generations. I argued for the importance of conceiving and implementing a utopian politics of justice that will disrupt business-as-usual and transform existing socioeconomic and political structures in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene.
What would you suggest to students who want to learn more about Environmental Humanities?
In the UMass English Department, Malcolm Sen is the director of the Environmental Humanities track and a key figure in the Anthropocene Lab initiative. The Anthropocene Lab events are a good platform to get in touch with EH works going on on campus.
The English Department also offers EH courses at graduate and undergraduate levels. Professors like Mazen Naous, Rachel Mordecai, Asha Nadkarni, and Marjorie Rubright also incorporate EH in their courses.
Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, Jeremy Davies’ The Birth of the Anthropocene, Andes Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything are good books to start with to explore the environment question from different viewpoints. I would also recommend climate fiction like Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of Sower, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.
Why should students study Environmental Humanities?
Environmental Humanities is a comparatively new but exciting field of research. And also a very urgent one given the unprecedented environmental crisis we are in now. I don’t claim that EH will solve the crisis overnight, but it definitely will help us navigate problems and imagine possible ways to devise solutions. EH can contribute to our fight for justice and a habitable and collective future for both humans and non-humans.