Integrate the Humanities
North American Observatory
Each of our observatory’s projects and activities seek to integrate the human sciences (humanities, social sciences, and arts) into all research and outcomes focusing on sustainability, environmental justice and food sovereignty.
Global Humanities Partners
Global Humanities Affiliates
Global Humanities Projects
We engage in cross-regional collaborations with partners throughout North America and across the HfE observatory network globally.
North American Observatory Events
Futures Literacy Workshop
Storying Just Futures Lecture: Denise Moreno Ramírez
10.17.25
Communities in Arizona and Mexico have been leading on environmental, justice issues for over 30 years. They have also raised new generations to lead these efforts as they pass the baton. Join us to hear Denise Moreno Ramírez’s story about stepping into
second generation environmental leadership on the local and global stage.
Denise Moreno Ramírez is the assistant director of The Earth League Secretariat at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.
Storying Just Futures Grant Workshop
2025 Seres Puentes International Award and HfE Distinguished Lecture
Our community is engaged in a range of research projects
North American
From Sea to Sky: Archipelagic Thinking, Desert/Island Poetics, and Island Systems
From Sea to Sky is a Spring 2026 hybrid panel series that uses archipelagic thinking to place island and desert studies in dialogue, examining how seemingly discrete landscapes are bound by shared histories, ecologies, and imaginaries.
North American
Create the Change
Create the Change (CTC), supported by a President’s Special Initiative grant, addresses the moral, cultural, political, and economic complexities that hinder progress toward planetary health—challenges that cannot be solved by technology alone. The program mobilizes the social sciences and humanities in partnership with sustainability sciences to confront issues such as disinformation, social and environmental injustice, power imbalances, and cultural barriers.
North American
Storying Just Futures
Storying Just Futures (SJF) program invites students and youth leaders to create fair and compassionate futures. This initiative aligns with ASU’s Changing Futures campaign, aiming to encourage future changemakers and enhance community resilience.
North American
Food Sovereignty and Syndemic Project
For two decades, scholars in the arts and environmental humanities have been researching and teaching courses that focus on climate. More recently, they have been focusing on the links between climate, environmental injustices, food insecurities and health disparities.
North American
Inter/Desert Dialogues
A virtual roundtable series at Arizona State University (ASU), brings together artists, writers, scholars, activists, land managers, and others to inspire respect for arid environments and the people, plants, animals, histories, and geologies that make them up.
North American
Coastal Conservatory
The “Coastal Conservatory: Listening for Coastal Futures” is an initiative of the University of Virginia that is integrating the arts and humanities into an investigation of how we might create new ways of experiencing, understanding, and ‘hearing’ the dynamics reshaping coasts.
Climate Future Reading
Featured Exhibit ECOTarot Deck
Observatory Affiliates
Community members, researchers and scholars.
Joni Adamson
Joni Adamson is President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University. She is the Secretary General of the Humanities for the Environment Network and Director of the North American Observatory. She is the author and/or co-editor of American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism (University of Arizona Press, 2001), The Environmental Justice Reader: (University of Arizona Press, 2002),m American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Ecology (Routledge, 2013), Keywords for Environmental Studies (New York University Press, 2016), Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies—Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (Routledge 2017) and Humanities for the Environment (Routledge 2017). She lectures internationally and has published over 80 articles, chapters, blogs and reviews. Her work has been supported by many awards and grants, including most recently, the 2019 Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. In 2012, she served as President of the world’s largest environmental humanities organization, The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
Edauri Navarro-Perez
Dr. Navarro-Perez completed her PhD in Environmental Life Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU) in July 2024. Her research explored how plant roots, specifically grass root functional traits, respond to different soil conditions created by restoration efforts, how these traits influence decomposition, and how emerging photogrammetry tools can be used to measure belowground processes.
Alongside her scientific work, Dr. Navarro-Perez is deeply interested in community engagement, intersectional justice, and art–science communication. Bringing these interests together has shaped her approach to ecological restoration as a holistic practice that connects ecosystems, people, and systems of care.
Owain Jones
Owain gained an MSc (Society and Space) and PhD in Cultural Geography at the world-leading Department of Geography, University of Bristol 1993-1997. Conducting post-doctoral research at Bristol, Exeter, the Open University and other institutions, in a series of RCUK funded projects, we has studied and written about many aspects of nature-society relations including; landscape, place and memory; the environmental crisis; children’s geographies; and transformative theories of pragmatism and non-representation. He has conducted research projects on water and society (floods, tides, coastal cultures); trees, place and landscape; and childhood, memory, nature and place. He led a £1.5 million Art and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities project which involves eight UK universities, and numerous community partners and artists in four case study areas across the UK. This project sought to creatively explore and transform connections within and between communities, and communities and nature, in relation to water issues. Owain was appointed as the first Professor of Environmental Humanities in the UK in 2014 at Bath Spa University, and was deputy director of the Research Centre for the Environmental Humanities 2016 – 2019. He has published/co-published over 90 scholarly articles and five books; Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide: Embodiment, performance, practice (2023), with Anna Pigott, and Ben Parry; Visual Culture in the Northern British Archipelago: Imagining Islands (2018), with Ysanne Holt and David-Martin-Jones; Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (2017), with Michelle Bastian, Niamh Moore and Emma Roe; Geography and Memory: Identity, Place and Becoming, (2012), with Jo Garde-Hansen; Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees, and Trees in their Place (2002), with Paul Cloke. He has successfully supervised four Environmental Humanities PhDs with art practice.
Joan McGregor
Joan McGregor is a philosophy professor and faculty head in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose current research is focused on environmental, climate, and food injustices to members of racial minority groups. Growing out of a Mellon funded grant, “Humanities for the Anthropocene” she led a project entitled Dinner 2040: The Future of Food resulting in an event in 2016 with 90 humanists and community members envisioning and planning a justice food future. In 2020, our team were awarded another Mellon grant in collaboration with universities around the world, the grant’s title is: CHCI Global Humanities Institute on Climate Justice and Problems of Scale. As a result of projects like it, Arizona Humanities Council picked her as Outstanding Public Humanities Scholar in 2019. Another related research project is focused on the loss of moral capital and how moral repair will require building our moral capital in an inclusion manner. In 2016, she directed her third NEH Summer Institute: “Extending the Land Ethic: Current Humanities Voices and Sustainability.” Other recent articles published: “Towards a Philosophical Understanding of TEK and Ecofeminism” in Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Methods for Environmental Sustainability (2018): “Values on your plate: Dinner 2040” Resilience 4.2 (2018); “Public Interests and the Duty of Food Citizenship” Citizenship and Immigration – Borders, Migration and Political Membership in a Global (2016); “Force, Consent and the Reasonable Woman,” reprinted in Sexual Ethics: An Anthology (July 2016).
Mauricio Mejía
G. Mauricio Mejía is an associate professor of design at Arizona State University. He explores design approaches to change behaviors, transform systems, and envision desirable futures. His current research and practice are related to diverse areas of application including health, sustainability, and business innovation. Dr. Mejía studies and works with emergent and strategic design practices such as visual sense-making, interaction design, service design, organizational design, and design futures. He received a PhD in Design from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a Master of Design degree from the University of Cincinnati.
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is Regents Professor, Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, the Director of Jewish Studies, and Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. She holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Philosophy and Mysticism from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1978), and a BA in Religious Studies from SUNY-Stony Brook, New York (1974).
Tirosh-Samuelson is a Jewish intellectual historian who focuses on the interplay of philosophy and mysticism, Judaism and science, and Judaism and ecology. In addition to over 50 essays and book chapters, she is the author of Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (1991) which received the award of the Hebrew University for the best work in Jewish history for 1991, and the author of Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge and Well-Being in Premodern Judaism (2003), and Religion and Environment: The Case of Judaism (2020).
Tirosh-Samuelson explores the interplay of religion, science and technology with a focus on transhumanism and the relationship between Judaism, science and medicine. She is the PI or Co-PI of several Templeton funded projects: 1) “Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, and Technology” (2006-2010); 2) “The Transhumanist Imagination: Innovation, Secularization and Eschatology” (2012-14); “Beyond Secularization: Piloting New Approaches for the Study of Religion, Science, and Technology in Public Life” (2016-2018) and 4) “Beyond Secularization: Religion, Science, and Technology in Public Life” (2019-2022). Tirosh-Samuelson also serves as Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at ASU, and manages the international society, Judaism, Science and Medicine Group (JSMG) and organizes its annual conferences.