Fire Humanities

Fire Humanities is a book project, an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration, and the name of an emerging field of study. Growing out of collaborative projects in the Confluence Lab—most recently, a grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, awarded in August of 2024 and defunded in April of 2025—the fire humanities takes as a foundational premise that learning to live well with more fire is not just a matter of educating people about preparedness or conducting more fuels reduction projects. We need to understand fire’s human dimensions. 

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While fire science draws on quantitative data analysis, digital modeling, and remote sensing to predict fire behavior and ecological effects, the fire humanities add qualitative methods to fire research by foregrounding the dynamic historical, cultural, and aesthetic relationships humans have with fire. In an essay for the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network, Sasha Michelle White coined the phrase “fire humanities” and explained that “reckoning with landscape fire means reckoning with cultural fuels as well as ecological ones. Effective fire adaptation will require that the cultural ‘fuel loads’—the stories, values, beliefs—and ‘fuel ladders’—the social networks, partnerships, and trust or lack thereof—that have contributed to the current wildfire crisis be examined, and that new ‘loads’ and ‘ladders,’ in which fire is recast as an ally and progenitor of community strength, be created.” Fire Humanities as a book project aims to both expose and shift the dominant paradigm that has fomented the current wildfire crisis, including the demonization of fire, the criminalization of Indigenous fire practices, and the preeminence of fire-phobic settler cultural values. 

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We take several sets of questions to heart. The first set is about how humanities and arts practitioners can make the cultural dimensions of fire more legible, both exposing unhelpful representations and creating or amplifying better ones. We ask:

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How can the humanities and arts make legible the cultural dimensions of fire? How can humanities scholarship expose and challenge the violence(s)—historical and ongoing—related to fire? What narrative and aesthetic forms might be harnessed, amplified, or created to support more nuanced understandings of landscape fire, whether wild, prescribed, or cultural? 

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The second set of questions demonstrates a commitment to being self-reflexive about our own disciplines and methodologies in the process. With that in mind, we ask:

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How does fire challenge the methodologies of humanities scholarship? What is humanities knowledge in a world increasingly understood as in crisis? How are our methodologies useful, and how do they need to change? How can humanist scholarship avoid re-inscribing dominant paradigms of fire, and how can western-trained and Indigenous scholars collaborate meaningfully? How might humanities knowledge and methods be enhanced by learning from practitioners who specialize in applied research and fieldwork, including “boots on the ground” fire scientists and fire practitioners? 

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Fire Humanities project team members have shared our work-in-progress at the 2025 ASLE Conference, Penn State’s “Heat and the Humanities” event and, most recently, a public panel discussion and conversation at the Burke Museum, in Seattle. We hope the book will be in print in 2027 and that this emerging field will continue to build momentum.