Dr. April Anson is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. She writes and teaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities and American studies, paying special attention to Indigenous studies, racial formation, and political theory. Her first book project theorizes the relationship between white supremacy, American environmental thought, and literary genre and identifies an early and unbroken Indigenous environmental justice tradition vital to our considerations of climate change today. Her work has appeared in Resilience, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and others. Jenna Gersie spoke with April about the public-facing and experimental work of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.

Tell me about the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) and the work you do there.

PPEH is an interdisciplinary program around four core commitments:

• broadly interdisciplinary, collaborative research on the environment across the arts and sciences

• arts-driven inquiry into place, particularly our campus and the City of Philadelphia as well as urban ecology in other global contexts

• public engagement, particularly in and with environmental justice communities and concerns

• the creation and growth of living archives via practices of urgent collection

As a postdoctoral fellow with PPEH, I contribute to ongoing PPEH initiatives, most recently the My Climate Story project and Futures Beyond Refining. Both projects lift up community expertise around climate change and environmental justice issues, both local to Philadelphia and beyond. I am also working on my own research, including work on public lands, an article on the rise of ecofascism, and revising my book manuscript.

In the manifesto for PPEH, it is described as “a lab for reflection and action.” In what ways is PPEH considered a lab?

PPEH is a lab in the sense of a place of experimental combination, a space for facilitating interdisciplinary conversations in ways that spark newly shared approaches to a problem set. It is also a lab in that it asks its participants to reflect on the experiments in a collaborative setting, asking what worked, what needs to be improved, what should be reimagined.

Who are the participants in this lab setting?

PPEH includes faculty like founding director Bethany Wiggin, Kristina Lyons, Nikhil Anand, and many others, as well as postdoctoral fellows Ben Mendelson and myself, dissertation fellow Martin Premoli, and graduate fellows Alex Chen, Knar Gavin, and Aylin Malcolm. Additionally, PPEH has a robust and inspiring group of undergraduate fellows and interns who blog, podcast, and were instrumental in planning the Futures Beyond Refining event in the fall.

How do the sciences and humanities intersect at PPEH?

As with any environmental humanities work, PPEH is interested in work informed by questions that both scientific and humanistic inquiry can answer, but neither can respond to by themselves. This often means that a research question or an initiative is informed by the scientific data and interpreted through humanistic methods. For example, the Schuylkill Archive includes historical and present day scientific data, photographs, and oral accounts that present an inclusive and interdisciplinary narrative of the river and surrounding river wards.

What are the public-facing elements of PPEH?

PPEH is profoundly public facing. All of its initiatives as well as the talks it hosts are open to the public and motivated by questions of who the work serves. Some of PPEH’s public-facing experiments include Data Refuge, a community-driven, collaborative project that preserves public climate and environmental data, and the Ecotopian Toolkit, which features an artist or team of artists who explore what it might mean to face contemporary ecological challenges with critically attuned and creatively oriented tools, and who then share their work in a public demonstration.

The Data Refuge experiment does the work of one of PPEH’s core commitments: “the creation and growth of living archives via practices of urgent collection.” Can you tell me more about this?

PPEH takes the local and lived realities of climate change as urgent sources of data, emphasizing the “citizen-scientist” approach to data collection but widening what “scientist” means to include lived experiences of local environments. For instance, what is the neighbor down the street noticing about climate change and Philadelphia’s bird populations? How, in her twenty years living in Philadelphia, have the sounds and types of birds changed? How has the weather disrupted or exacerbated migration patterns? How does it sound, or smell, or even taste different? There are no data points precise enough to account for the ways that someone has felt the changing climate and feels the disruptions that data describes.

What is the physical space of PPEH like? How does the space itself facilitate conversations like the ones taking place in these experiments and data collection?

We have a shared lounge and conference space; both are spaces where we frequently gather formally and informally. The informal conversations in passing, stopping by each others’ offices, or taking walking meetings are all generative of the familiarity and comfort necessary to intellectual risk-taking.

How do your own work and interests intersect with PPEH’s mission and projects?

I resonated deeply with the work of PPEH, from the first moment I read the first line of our manifesto. It begins with the declaration that “Nature has never been natural.” This acknowledgment has long oriented my research, teaching, and activism—recognizing that “nature” is shot through with power and history is a premise that drives my commitments inside and outside the academy. Additionally, like PPEH, I am deeply committed to public-facing work, which I consider as both broadening who is considered the “public” of a research question and whose voices are vital to make the central public in environmental humanities work. PPEH is a supportive and challenging home for my intellectual and ethical commitments, most of which could be understood to fall under the questions of “Whose publics? Whose lands?”