Summary

The mission of Life Overlooked is to disseminate local ecological knowledge and build the humanities and arts dimensions into the “portfolio” of what we know about individual species. ASU humanists created the ongoing, pedagogically oriented project in 2014. Contributors, including senior academics, community members and students, raise questions about the consequences of ecological transformation and control for wildlife, plants and the human-nature relationship. Students, becoming “citizen humanists” each create a portfolio of materials that focus on one “overlooked” species. They examine both traditional notions of stewardship (e.g., the idea of overlooking) and also cultural blind spots in traditional modes of interacting with nature and study their own “backyard” species through art, popular culture, and science. Contributors interviewed scientists, humanists and citizens in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico to create an archive that provides the team with opportunities to “think together” in ways that would not have occurred without the early support of the Mellon Foundation and ongoing support through Humanities for the Environment, North America.

Please find three sample syllabi for Life Overlooked here

For an in-depth article on this project, see

Joni Adamson, “Gathering the Desert in an Urban Lab: Designing the Citizen Humanities,”  Humanities for the Environment: Integrating knowledge, forging new constellations of practice, Routledge, 2017.