Environmental Humanities go pop!
Did you know that literature and the environment shape each other? More specifically, how do you think Shakespeare’s words shape our environment, and how does our environment shape our words?
In the works of William Shakespeare, characters frequently turn to the environment to understand their experiences. Shakespeare depicts a complex, entangled relationship between the human body and the natural world that complicates what we sometimes today understand through a human/nature dichotomy. From Hamlet’s ‘unweeded garden’ to Titus Andronicus’ ‘wilderness of sea’, the environment shapes the language of Shakespeare. And language – including the works of Shakespeare – influence our perception of our environments today. This can be examined through an environmental humanities lens. The environmental humanities is a capacious field, encompassing multiple disciplines and areas of interest – from ecocriticism to animal studies, environmental history to the Anthropocene. This pop-up spread encourages us to consider how literature – and literary studies – may influence our understanding of and engagement with the natural world.
A future ‘Tree’ pop-up book could illuminate our complex, entangled relationships with the natural world. It can ask exciting questions about how our understanding of the environment is shaped by literature like Shakespeare, and how we can use literature to question and reconceptualise environmental interactions in an age of climate crisis.
Stay tuned for a quote from the artist about her approach and thoughts on this pop-up spread!
Meet the researcher: Dr Claire Hansen
Claire Hansen is Senior Lecturer in English and Associate Dean (Student Experience and Integrity) at the Australian National University. She specialises in Shakespeare studies, environmental humanities, place and the health humanities. She is the author of Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Shakespeare and Complexity Theory (Routledge, 2017). She is coeditor of Reimagining Shakespeare Education (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities (Routledge, forthcoming 2024). Claire is a member of the Shakespeare Reloaded project and co-founder of the ANU Health Humanities Network.
The ULTRA-PERCEPTION project reimagines the book as a traditional medium, physical object and traditional knowledge broker, by amplifying it into an interactive, technologically-empowered tool for intergenerational discovery and learning. Supported by KINETIC – a funding scheme for “for game-changing new ideas” piloted in 2023 by ANU Physics, the ANU MakerSpace, Wizer and Compton School – we create a prototype of what will hopefully become a series of research-based pop-up books that are accompanied by an augmented reality app. Five of our initial six pop-up spreads, which can later be rolled out into individual books, are dedicated to specific research themes ranging from the research field of Environmental Humanities to Synthetic Biology. By hovering a prototype app, created by the Canberra animation company Eye Candy, over these spreads, the science-based pop-up pages come to life – through art and technology, awe and wonder. A new science experience!
