This working group takes as its starting point the Environmental Humanities as they intersect with the study of slavery and asymmetrical dependencies. The field of the Environmental Humanities addresses a wide array of ecological and environmentally oriented issues concerning climate change, the weather, environmental pressures, sustainability, globalisation, environmental justice and ethics, resource policy, extraction logics, infrastructure and agrarian politics, land ownership, and many more. As Ursula Heise has succinctly argued, "[t]he environmental humanities [...] envision ecological crises fundamentally as questions of socioeconomic inequality, cultural difference, and divergent histories, values, and ethical frameworks" (The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities 2017, 2).

The potential of the Environmental Humanities lies in expanding on and renegotiating the tenets of natural and technological sciences, with an emphasis on the social, cultural, and political relevance of the humanities as an indispensable part of meeting global challenges – past, present and future. Such an approach is well suited to bring together the BCDSS’s different research areas and focal points within the humanities and social sciences, which combine anthropological, aesthetic, literary, architectural, spatial, archaeological, ethnographic and technological perspectives, all fundamentally informed by historical approaches. An engagement with ecological dependencies can, we believe, offer a valuable critical perspective on questions of strong asymmetrical dependencies.  The working group aims to connect researchers from the Center whose work on slavery and asymmetrical dependencies touch in one way or another on: 

• the relationship between nature, humans and non-human entities across the humanities and social sciences
• ecosystems within and beyond individual, local, regional, national, transnational and planetary scales
• questions of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric agency and materiality (animal studies, posthumanism, new materialism, ecofeminism)
• extractive plantation systems and histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism
• issues of land ownership; land dispossession and extraction
• non-plantation forms of agricultural slavery
• climate change, climate justice and environmental crises (pollution; loss of biodiversity; waste; toxicity; epidemics; un/natural disasters)
• the interrelation of nature and culture in asymmetrical dependencies and the representation of nature-culture relationships in media, text, art, architecture
• sustainability within the humanities and social sciences, in interaction with philosophy, theology, sociology, economics, arts and literature
• representations of nature and ecological dependencies in non-western cultures

The initial aim of this working group is to gather researchers from all research areas of the BCDSS and to engage in critical discussions, shared readings and the conception of an interdisciplinary publication or working paper.