Initiatives

Environmental Humanities Related Initiatives at UVa:

Coastal Futures Conservatory

The Coastal Futures Conservatory integrates arts and humanities into the investigation of coastal change. Working with scientists at the Virginia Coastal Reserve, an NSF-supported Long-Term Ecological Research site, the Conservatory aims to deepen understanding and stimulate imagination by opening ways to listen to the dynamics reshaping coasts.

Mapping Indigenous Worlds

Mapping Indigenous Worlds is a Mellon Global South Humanities Lab at the University of Virginia. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mellon Global South Initiative empowers faculty, students, scholars, and community members to develop innovative research and curriculum about the Global South. Mapping Indigenous Worlds develops several key themes of the UVa Global South Initiative, most notably race and ethnicity, cartographies and spaces, language worlds, media ecologies and cultures, art and performance, cultures of human rights, and digital inequities.

The Sanctuary Lab

Exploring how climate change bears on sacred sites. We conduct multi-disciplinary inquiry at protected, contested places across the world, investigating how Anthropocene stresses are reshaping cultural landscapes. Sanctuaries reveal vital connections between natural environment and human tradition—we look to them as laboratories for how communities may negotiate the disorientations of rapid planetary change.

Water Futures Initiative

Water Futures is a pan-university initiative working on solutions to major socio-environmental challenges in water security. It is designed to achieve synthesis across disciplines and sectors in a problem-oriented framework. Water Futures will link faculty, students, and programs at UVA with leading scholars and professionals working in other academic and non-academic institutions, drawing from different backgrounds and perspectives.

WriteClimate

WriteClimate is an association of UVA students fighting for climate change awareness through literary, artistic, and activist means. WriteClimate convenes as a class every Spring semester at UVA (EVSC 1559). The WriteClimate Club operates year-round and expands upon the work done in the class.