Doing environmental humanities: inter/transdisciplinary research through an underwater 360° video poem

Abstract

Those who write about environmental humanities call on researchers to be interdisciplinary. But what kind of interdisciplinary research is required and how might a researcher actually do this form of research? The article presents one way for doing interdisciplinary research, using ecocritical analysis on Theodore Sturgeon’s short story, ‘It’, and then using that as a basis for developing an alternative narrative for a 360° video poem. To address what makes this research practice environmental humanities and not just ecocriticism, this article puts the histories of ecocriticism and environmental humanities in conversation with their approaches to interdisciplinarity. What seems apparent is that environmental humanities value external and instrumental forms of interdisciplinarity but that it also may be a burgeoning transdisciplinary effort.