Environment and Development

Course Description

This course is designed as a critical introduction to key debates around the relation between social inequality and nature, broadly construed. The urgent matters located at this intersection cut across political scales and geographic borders, threatening local livelihoods as well as global economic systems. Attending to both historical legacies and contemporary challenges, we will explore the political philosophies, economic processes, and techno-scientific practices that make socio-environmental justice such an elusive goal today. While grounded in political ecology, our approach in this course will be irreverent. By tracing political ecological themes through classic texts as well as recent permutations, we will incorporate knowledge derived from critical race and gender studies, environmental history, environmental anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies, all while remaining connected to political economic principles. Our aim is to renovate the key concepts of political ecology so that they travel better to our respective field sites. In particular, we will attend to the relationships between representation and production, discourse and materiality, in order to consider the multiple facets of socio-natural ‘development.’ Taught by Dr. Andrea Marston

Code

16:450:508

Credits

3

Subject

Geography