MA Environmental Humanities

• Year 1

• In your first semester you take our core module which hones your skills in postgraduate research and familiarises you with key debates in the environmental humanities. You will also choose a further module from our exciting range of optional modules which range across numerous disciplines. In your second semester, you’ll take two further optional modules. Over the summer period you research and write your dissertation on a subject of your choice, with one-to-one supervision and support. This is a chance to work independently on a sustained project that interests and excites you. The selection of elective modules may change from year to year, as we regularly rotate, refresh and add to our portfolio of modules. More information about these modules can be found in the Programme Specification document, below.

  Core modules

  • Research Methods & Debates in the Environmental Humanities (MAEH700)

    This module will develop both theoretical and practical research skills. It will explore current areas of debate within the field of the Environmental Humanities, including the nature of cross-disciplinary research. Practical research skills developed include library and digital research skills, the use of databases, and the structuring, managing, and presentation of a project.

  • Dissertation (MAEH701)

    The dissertation module provides the opportunity for students to undertake a supervised, self-directed, research project, independent of the modules they have studied. The project can be on any topic of their choice, relevant to the Environmental Humanities. It will make use of the IT, library, and other research and scholarly skills learnt the core Research Methods module and developed through subsequent modules.

  Optional modules

  • Digital Culture and Climate Change (DCS704)

    Social science approaches play a critical role in understanding how some of the most pressing issues of our time such as climate change are communicated and addressed. This module examines the role of digital media in communicating climate change and debates concerning impact and influence.

  • The Utopian Novel and Modernity (MAEL706)

    This module will explore the intersection of utopian thinking, theory and the novel over a period spanning the late nineteenth century to the present. It will explore how this intersection relates to relevant political and cultural issues and contexts such as globalism, politics, gender and the environment. The module will engage with prominent theorists of utopia such as Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson. It will also focus on the work of a range of authors, such as William Morris, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson.

  • Ocean Modernity: Literatures of the sea, 1850- the present (MAEL707)

    This module explores literary and cultural representations of the ocean from 1850 to the present. By engaging with a diverse array of literary and cultural texts, including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, theory and visual art, it will examine diverse and shifting cultural imaginaries of the sea. In so doing, it will also investigate wider relations between humanity and the non-human world in modernity.

  • Natural Knowledge and Narrative Knowing: Literatures of nature in North America (MAEL713)

    With a chronology from the colonial period to the twentieth century, this module examines the environmental literatures of North America, acknowledging the contexts and legacies of settler colonialism. By engaging with a diverse ranges of prose texts – eg. natural histories, the periodical press, novels, travel narratives – this module will analyse competing systems of knowledge production, western and indigenous, through a variety of literary forms.

  • Filth and the Victorians (MAHI726)

    In this module students study the Victorian era from the perspective of environment, public hygiene, cultural values of cleanliness and fear of physical, moral and other forms of contamination. Drawing on urban histories, histories of medicine and science, the module also uses a range of literary and artistic sources.

  • The Experience of Outdoor Learning (MASU753)

    This module discusses key concepts within outdoor learning as well as its connection with experiential learning and its value and potential from early years to adulthood. Consideration is given to the value that the natural environment has in education as well as to personal development and wellbeing. Participants are encouraged to deepen their own experience and critical thinking in relation to the subject as well as to the means by which they would like to develop their own practice.

  • Learning for Sustainability and Global Citizenship (MASU755)

    This innovative module uses an applied community engaged approach to look critically and creatively at notions of sustainability and global citizenship competencies, and the learning contexts and systems in which individuals, institutions and communities gain these competencies. This entails applying the UN Sustainable development Goals to real world projects that seek to address sustainability priorities in and around the city of Plymouth, enabling students to explore ideas of interdisciplinarity and interconnectedness, with a dynamic and experiential link between theory and practice. This inclusion of a service learning pedagogical approach enables consideration of the potential contribution of formal and non-formal education, whilst emphasising the links between our lives and those of people throughout the world. In so doing, it allows students to consider ways to actively contribute to a world in which power and resources for change leadership are more equitably shared.

  • Coastal Cultures: Marine Anthropology in the Age of Climate Change and Mass Extinction (MAEH703)

    Using a range of anthropological theoretical frameworks, this module analyses how coastal communities use the sea - not only as a source of livelihood, but as a key ingredient in the construction of their identity and place in world. Drawing on a range of ethnographic case study from around the world, we study how coastal communities are responding to climate change, climate change scepticism, sea level rise, pollution, and extinction. Through such debates, we examine how anthropology in general and marine ethnography specifically can contribute to the protection and management of endangered human and non-human life-worlds.

Every postgraduate taught course has a detailed programme specification document describing the programme aims, the programme structure, the teaching and learning methods, the learning outcomes and the rules of assessment.

The following programme specification represents the latest programme structure and may be subject to change:

MA Environmental Humanities Programme Specification 6923