Rice University is refocusing its efforts on the Center for Environmental Studies (CES) in order to enhance and advance the center's research goals and initiatives regarding environmental issues in our society.
Going into its fifth year of operation, CES researches the social and cultural dimensions of environmental problems and leverages the arts, humanities, architecture and design and the social sciences to imagine solutions for a thriving planet. The center's researchers work with community partners focused on environmental problems in Houston and the Gulf Coast.
"The Center for Environmental Studies aims to create a place where understanding environmental problems critically, culturally and historically enables us to imagine equitable solutions and just futures in which we not only survive but thrive alongside the many other creatures and living systems with whom we share this planet," said Joseph Campana, the William Shakespeare Professor of English and center director.
Support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation allowed the center to expand its reach and build local and regional networks with other institutions. New support from the Office of Research now makes Rice distinctive relative to its peers, Campana said.
"Environmental problems are very much human problems," he said. "Without understanding the cultures that create the challenges we face today and that can prevent change for the future, we don't stand a chance. We need the contributions of all disciplines and practices, including those that can seem less immediately relevant. So few universities who invest in sustainability, energy and the environment of late prioritize the arts, architecture, humanities and interpretive social sciences, which offer their own vital contributions to the wicked problems of our day and which create extraordinary opportunities for collaboration with the natural sciences and engineering."
The center, based in the School of Humanities in partnership with the School of Architecture, also translates scholarship into resources for the public. It serves as a cross-campus connector hosting conversations and events for a broad, multidisciplinary audience.
"We are thrilled that the university has recognized the significance of the humanities in the study of climate crisis and sustainable futures," said Kathleen Canning, dean of the School of Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History. "The interdisciplinary field of environmental studies has enormous potential to forge new links among and between our humanities disciplines and is relevant to nearly every one of them, from art to religion and philosophy. We salute Professor Campana's success in elevating and expanding the program over the last four years: The Center will foster new arenas of interdisciplinary inquiry and build upon its thriving public outreach and engagement to become a national leader in the study of the human origins and human consequences of environmental transformation."
"Through the re-imagined Center for Environmental Studies, we hope to spotlight the architectural, artistic and humanistic paths towards a more sustainable and optimistic planetary future," said Igor Marjanović, the William Ward Watkin Dean of the School of Architecture. "I am grateful to Dean Canning and Director Campana for their partnership, and I look forward to our work together, both here at Rice and in the larger Houston community as well in the Gulf Coast region and further afield."
To focus efforts, the center has designated several often-intersecting research areas of significance, including biodiversity, food systems, pedagogy, urban green spaces, environmental media and environmental health.
"We're trying to stage invigorating conversations that lead to impactful research on vital questions," Campana said. "How should we understand migration in an age of global warming? How do we grapple with heat socially and culturally as well as architecturally and technologically? How do different media forms impact conversations about the environment? What are the best ways to represent and communicate about changing environmental circumstances? Does the past offer lessons for adaptation as we imagine more equitable futures?"
CES grew from multiple previous initiatives. In 2002, Walter Isle, professor of English, and Paul Harcombe, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, founded the Center for the Study of the Environment and Society (CSES) and with it the Environmental Studies program, a curricular effort to sponsor courses about environment and ecology across disciplines. In 2011, a faculty-led initiative produced the Cultures of Energy Working Group to explore energy from a range of disciplines across the arts, humanities, architecture and social sciences.
Out of the Cultures of Energy Working Group in 2013 emerged the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) under the leadership of Dominic Boyer, professor of anthropology.
In 2019, the schools of humanities and architecture became home to the renamed Center for Environmental Studies, which continues the work of the CSES and CENHS by broadening its rubric to recognize the growing diversity of topics and approaches to energy and ecology in research and by sustaining and deepening its commitments to educating through the Environmental Studies program for future generations who face the urgent, accumulating impacts of our ecological moment.
To learn more about CES, visit enst.rice.edu.
