At the ITN’s three-day induction meeting in October 2015, ESRs were given an overview of the structure and purpose of the ITN; were formally introduced to representatives from partner organizations (Bündnis Mensch und Tier; Dagens Nyheter; Yorkshire Wildlife Trust) as well as supervisory board members from Leeds, Munich, and Stockholm; and were given the opportunity to present their PhD proposals to the board, with extensive feedback and two-way discussion following in each case. ESRs were also invited to take part in a university-wide colloquium focusing on the benefits of collaborating across media and disciplines.
The development of the ITN as a collective was further enhanced during the first stage by designing a joint website, henceforth actively used by the ESRs; by offering a range of host-institution-led training activities: customized in-house training events, research colloquia, reading groups, seminar series; and by creating a further series of cross-institutional opportunities explicitly designed to bring ESRs together outside of their host institutions. This included the program’s inaugural conference, ‘The Future of Wild Europe’, which took place in Leeds from September 12–14, 2016. This three-day interdisciplinary conference, attracting more than 90 delegates from Europe and beyond, was designed to gauge the meaning, place, and value of ‘the wild’ within the Europe of today and the future.
An October 2017 five-day summer school on Public Environmental Humanities in Stockholm was organized by the Stockholm-based ESRs with solid support from other ENHANCE team members at KTH. Highlights of the Summer School included lively public talks by the American ecofeminist scholar Stacy Alaimo and the Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Dan Fagin; a guided tour of a local ethnographic museum; and a series of practical talks and workshops at the headquarters of Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s widest circulating daily newspapers (and one for which, during the course of the program, several of the ESRs would come to write).
Further features of the 2017–18 period included a series of programme-related training events and workshops, several of them organized by the ESRs themselves, preparation for the culminating 2018 conference-cum-exhibition in Munich, and a raft of international activities, both group and individual, that spanned several different countries in Europe and elsewhere. Several of these activities went far beyond the traditional bounds of academia, and a defining characteristic of the ITN as it developed was the willingness of its young participants to engage with environmental issues in the public domain.
All 12 ESRs were highly active, continuing to produce collaborative as well as individual work and coming together as a group to organize and implement the main event of this particular period: a three-day conference-cum-exhibition co-hosted by LMU and the Deutsches Museum and running from October 17 to October 20 2018. The main aim of this thrilling open-to-the-public event, which also featured keynote addresses from world-leading environmental scholars Robert Bullard, Sheila Jasanoff, and Erik Snydegouw, was to showcase the work of the ESRs themselves, which was exhibited through a series of state-of-the-art posters and VR installations. The event also provided a further opportunity for the ITN to work together with some of its associated partners, with workshops on environmental management and the role of media in supporting sustainable development being delivered by colleagues from Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Dagens Nyheter, respectively.
