Introduction: Teaching the Environmental Humanities in Europe

This special issue of Lagoonscapes gathers pedagogical reflections, teaching concepts, and experiments developed by university teachers across Europe who work in conversation with the field of the Environmental Humanities. Amidst the escalating climate crisis, accelerated by a resurgence of right-wing nationalisms and ongoing systems of environmental injustice, learning how to teach (and learn) with, through, and about socio-ecological precarity, interdependencies, and enmeshment is a crucial and increasingly urgent task that requires an expansion of traditional methodologies and subject matters. With an emphasis on place-based, creative, and collaborative approaches to pedagogy, this collection features contributions from the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and Belgium that foreground interdisciplinary dialogues – from literary and cultural studies, to visual and conceptual art, maritime history, ethnography, and (coastal) archaeology. Committed to an understanding of Environmental Humanities teaching as education for change, many contributions take the learning process beyond customary classroom settings and foster conversations between critical EH theory and embodied, situated experience.