Geohumanities I: Elements, animacy, and memory

Geographers, humanities scholars, artists, and practitioners of many kinds are thinking, feeling, and practicing with the elements. In this first of three progress reports on the geohumanities, I explore a growing body of geographical, humanistic, and artistic work that has foregrounded elemental materials, forces, media, and particles as they are implicated in an increasingly urgent set of questions and contestations about anticolonial geographical practice, interdisciplinary knowledge production, and environmental politics. More specifically, elemental animacies and elemental memories guide my reflections on new and existing work in the geohumanities and its relevance for ideas of “environment” at the core of this journal.