The third exhibit in an ongoing series to highlight Emory Subject Librarians and Emory Libraries’ range of collections, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” The Environment and the Humanities, opened on Friday, January 18, 2019, in Woodruff Library’s entry level atrium.
Inspired by global industrialization, emerging international environmental movements, resource crises, and climate change, mid- to late-twentieth-century scholars, activists, and artists began to ask new questions about the relationships between humans and the natural world. The environmental humanities look to incorporate knowledge and perspectives beyond a single field in order to address the challenges of environmental change. The environmental humanities raise fundamental questions about value, justice, sustainability, responsibility, and purpose on a planet where humans and the environment are impacting each other with ever greater intensity.
“Do I dare disturb the universe?” details Emory Libraries’ environmental humanities holdings as well as Emory-led and other publicly accessible environmental humanities projects.
Visitors can read about how the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS)’s multimedia open-access journal, Southern Spaces and the immersive digital Georgia Coast Atlas are shedding new light on real and imagined environments in the U.S. South, as well as how other organizations like Smithsonian Institution and McGill University are using big data to explore environs across the globe.
The exhibit also highlights oral history collections that capture the voices of often marginalized figures impacted by environmental disasters and empowering themselves through grassroots activism and policy debates.
Several environmentally-focused artists’ books from Emory’s Rose Library collection are displayed in a neighboring sister exhibit called Collecting Stories.
The exhibit also presents scores of environmentally-focused books for checkout as well as a handout with recommended albums and films available for loan from the Music & Media Library on Woodruff Library’s fourth floor.
The earlier exhibits in the Emory Subject Librarians series were Addressing Global Issues: Emory Faculty Authors with International Area Studies Librarians (2016-2017) and Globalization: Research It Here (2017-2018).