Greening Modern Languages
Greening Modern Languages: Research and Teaching is a collaborative project that aims to think about the role that our discipline has to play in times of ecological crises. In ‘greening’ Modern Languages, we want to rethink our academic practice as educators, scholars and eco-citizens; how this intersects with efforts to decentre and decolonise the curriculum; and foster a reflection on the place of Modern Languages in the Environmental Humanities and in collective action towards sustainability and justice.
The project is led by Dr Armelle Blin-Rolland (Prifysgol Bangor / Bangor University, Wales), Dr Margaret C. Flinn (The Ohio State University, US) and Dr Martín Veiga (Coláiste na hOllscoile Corcaigh / University College Cork, Ireland). Bringing together an international network of scholars across language specialisms, this website stems from the online conference ‘Greening Modern Languages Research and Teaching’ (which took place in spring of 2023) and is funded by Dr Armelle Blin-Rolland’s British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Grant (SRG22\220097). Original artwork for this website was created by Breton painter Dominique Rolland.
Outputs from the conference include an academic publication (in preparation); and this website, which features the multilingual lexicon, pedagogical toolkit, an archive of the asynchronous conversations that took place in the run up to the conference, and details and recordings of the online seminar series Récits des vivants / More-than-human Narratives that took place from February to July 2023.
If you’re interested in the project, you have any ideas, questions, comments, thoughts that you’d like to share, or you’d like to contribute to our multilingual lexicon and our pedagogical toolkit or the project in any way, we’d be delighted to hear from you! Please contact us at ecomodlang@gmail.com.
What do we mean by ‘greening’ Modern Languages?
Modern Languages as a discipline has been profoundly and productively decentred in the postcolonial context, moving beyond the nations that ‘for a long time, determined [its] boundaries’ (Forsdick 2015: 2). We argue for further rethinking the field in times of ecological crises, positing that it has a key role to play in urgent conversations about the importance of the Humanities in understanding and reassessing environmental practices.
We conceive of greening Modern Languages as an intervention in our field that is entangled with decolonising and decentring the curriculum, in critiquing toxic discourses and ideologies and denouncing their material effects on bodies and territories; and exploring politics, ethics and aesthetics of resistance and solidarity across diverse geopolitical and linguistic contexts, including minoritized and peripheralized areas.
EcoModLang encompasses research and teaching, in fostering sustainable practices in and beyond the classroom, and engages not only with the cultures of our specialisms but also the local environments and communities in which Universities themselves are situated.
We argue that greening the Modern Languages curriculum reaches beyond adding a number of ‘green’ texts to reading lists, and consists rather in reevaluating our pedagogical praxis and refusing to background the environment and earth others (to use lexicon developed by environmental philosopher Val Plumwood 1993, 2002) in the cultures in which we specialize and about which we teach.
The ‘Greening Modern Languages Research and Teaching’ online conference that took place in spring of 2023, and this website, are a starting point to lay the foundations of ‘greening’ Modern Languages. We are very keen to hear from anyone who would like to be involved in this collaborative project, so if you have any ideas, thoughts, questions, please contact us at ecomodlang@gmail.com.
Key Themes
These are some of the key themes that we are interested in exploring from the perspective(s) of any field(s) within Modern Languages:
Narratives and counter-narratives of the environment across cultures and media
Languages of the environment
Environmental cultures in minoritized and lesser-spoken languages
Translating nature
Decolonial ecologies and transcolonial eco-resistance movements
Environmental activisms: local struggles and regional/national/transnational networks
Crossing (language) borders: environmental migration, mobilities and immobilities, the role of intercultural competence
Environmental and animal philosophies across languages
Intercultural competence and interspecies competence
Environment and marginalised or non-dominant identities: ecofeminism; environmental disability studies; queer ecologies
Environment, food, health and wellbeing across societies
Creativity and sustainability: Environmental Modern Languages and practice as research
Teaching Environmental Modern Languages at school and university levels; intercultural pedagogy and the environment; exploring cultural dimensions of sustainability in world language classrooms; language for Specific Purposes (LSP) and sustainable development
Sustainability and study abroad: offsetting environmental impacts of short-term travel study programs; integration of environmental humanities topics into study abroad curricula; ethical engagement with the environment and Indigenous communities through study abroad
Cultural extinction and regional/non-dominant/bilingual language instruction
Environmental and pedagogical concerns and opportunities during increasingly electronic/digitally based instruction; sustainability and shifts in resource allocation during austerity and pandemic
The Organising Committee
Armelle Blin-Rolland
Bangor University Prifysgol Bangor
Profile
Margaret C. Flinn
The Ohio State University
Profile
Martín Veiga
University College Cork Coláiste na hOllscoile Corcaigh
Profile
