EDGES: Engaged Digital German Environmental Studies
Engaged Digital German Environmental Studies (EDGES), launched by Kiley Kost and Seth Peabody (Carleton College), Daniel Nolan (University of Minnesota Duluth), and Sabine von Mering (Brandeis University) aims to help future-proof German Studies by providing German Studies scholars interested in German Environmental Studies with opportunities to share their work and collaborate across distances without the carbon footprint of air travel.
The EDGES group emerged from the 2023 Seminar “Environment, Activism, and Social Change in German Studies” at the GSA conference in Montréal. In July 2024, EDGES hosted its first first-ever online symposium with the goal of creating an alternative virtual space for academic engagement. We plan each symposium in response to what participants hope to gain from coming together for discussion. Participants, therefore, are invited to propose a range of projects, from formal conference-style presentations to workshopping a work-in-progress. Our symposium features a flexible format that is different each year. In 2025, in response to participants’ comments, we expanded opportunities for collaborators to engage socially. We also provided an opportunity to discuss the intersection of scholarly work on the cultural context of climate action and ongoing efforts in climate activism with Luisa Neubauer. We encourage participants to use the symposium as a way to develop work for publication. In 2025, several Symposium participants contributed to an special issue of the journal German Politics and Society, co-edited by symposium organizers Kiley Kost, Seth Peabody, Sabine von Mering and Daniel Nolan, forthcoming 2026.
Save the dates for the next EDGES Symposium: July 20-21, 2026