Environmental Studies
Students may complete a major or minor in Environmental Studies.
The Bi-Co Environmental Studies major combines the strengths of our two liberal arts campuses to create an interdisciplinary program that teaches students to synthesize diverse disciplinary knowledge and approaches, and to communicate effectively across disciplinary boundaries as they engage with environmental issues. In addressing these issues, ENVS students apply critical thinking and analytical skills within a holistic framework that includes social justice as an essential component.
The ENVS major incorporates praxis community-based learning as well as core courses that examine the theoretical and empirical approaches that the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities bring to local and global environmental questions. In addition, ENVS majors pursue an individually selected area of environmental expertise - a focus area - in order to gain a depth of knowledge and to develop a sense of their own agency in addressing what most concerns them. The ENVS program also provides opportunities for independent and collaborative research, including co-curricular learning, via local, national, and international internships and opportunities to study abroad.
Major Requirements
Students are required to take a minimum of 11 courses in the Environmental Studies major. Six required courses are in the core program, which consists of:
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ENVS B101 | Introduction to Environmental Studies (preferably in the first year) | 1 |
| ENVS B201 | Laboratory in Environmental Sciences 1 | 1 |
| ENVS B202 | Environment and Society 1 | 1 |
| ENVS B203 | Environmental Humanities: Environmental Futures Writing Workshop. 1 | 1 |
| ENVS B204 | Place, People and Praxis in Environmental Studies 1 | 1 |
| ENVS B397 | Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies (taken during the fall or spring semester) | 1 |
| Total Units | 6 | |
- 1
These 200-level core courses should be taken early in a student’s course of study, preferably several in the second year.
Electives, Including Focus Area
A wide variety of environmentally themed courses offered by departments across the Bi-Co may serve as EMVS electives, but the five elective courses must fulfill the following requirements:
- At least three elective courses must articulate a coherent intellectual or thematic focus (“focus area”) that students develop in consultation with their ENVS advisor;
- A minimum of one course must come from each of two broad divisional groups: natural sciences, math, and engineering; humanities, social sciences, and arts.
- At least two elective courses must be taken at the 300 level or equivalent.
A student’s focus area may be organized by a specific perspective on the study of the environment, a particular interdisciplinary focus, or even a geographic region. Focus areas are designed in consultation with an ENVS advisor. Early planning for the ENVS major allows students to begin satisfying prerequisites for advanced focus area courses.
Sample focus area topics include, but are not limited to: Environment and Society, Environmental Policy, Earth Systems, Environmental Modeling, Environmental Art and Technology, and Environment in East Asia.
Courses taken as ENVS major electives need not be prefixed with “ENVS” in the course catalog. Advanced courses with appropriate thematic content offered by any program, from Africana Studies, through Mathematics, to Visual Studies, may be counted.
Upon declaration of the ENVS major, the coursework plan must be approved by a major advisor on the student’s home campus. Courses approved for the Environmental Studies major at Swarthmore can be used to satisfy Bi-Co ENVS requirements contingent upon major advisor approval.
Minor Requirements
The Environmental Studies minor consists of six courses, including an introductory course. The six required courses are:
- A required introductory course to be taken prior to the senior year. This may be ENVS B101 at Bryn Mawr or (ENVS H101) Haverford or the parallel course at Swarthmore College (ENVS S001). Any one of these courses will satisfy the requirement, and students may take no more than one such course for credit toward the minor.
- Four elective courses from approved lists of core and cognate courses, including two credits in each of the two categories below. Students may use no more than one cognate course credit for each category. (See the ENVS website for course lists and more about core and cognate courses.) No more than one of these four course credits may be in the student’s major.
- Environmental Science, Engineering, and Math: courses that build understanding and knowledge of scientific methods and theories, and explore how these can be applied in identifying and addressing environmental challenges.
- Environmental Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts: courses that build understanding and knowledge of social and political structures as well as ethical considerations, and how these inform our individual and collective responses to environmental challenges.
- An advanced elective in Environmental Studies (300-level or its equivalent at Swarthmore) that can be from either category.
ENVS B397 is no longer required or recommended for the ENVS minor.
Students interested in the ENVS Minor should plan their course schedule with their home-campus Director of Environmental Studies in consultation with their major advisor. In choosing electives, students should aim to include mostly intermediate or advanced courses.
ENVS B101 Introduction to Environmental Studies (1 Unit)
The course offers a cross-disciplinary introduction to environmental studies. Tracing an arc from historical analysis to practical engagement, distinctive approaches to key categories of environmental inquiry are presented: political ecology, earth science, energy, economics, public health, ecological design, sustainability, public policy, and environmental ethics. Basic concepts, such as thermodynamics, biodiversity, cost-benefit analysis, scale, modernization, enclosure, the commons, and situational ethics, are variously defined and employed within specific explorations of environmental challenges in the modern world. No divisional credit is awarded for this course at Haverford nor does the course satisfy any of the Bryn Mawr approaches to inquiry.
ENVS B201 Laboratory in Environmental Sciences (1 Unit)
A lab-intensive introduction to environmental science research, exploring perspectives on scientific knowledge production, application-oriented scientific reporting, and historical context for sites of study. Includes field sampling and data collection, analysis of multiple datasets, and communication of findings to diverse audiences. Prerequisites: ENVS 101 or permission of instructor.
ENVS B202 Environment and Society (1 Unit)
An exploration of the ways in which different cultural, economic, and political settings have shaped issue emergence and policy making. We examine the politics of particular environmental issues in selected countries and regions, paying special attention to the impact of environmental movements. We also assess the prospects for international cooperation in addressing global environmental problems such as climate change.
ENVS B203 Environmental Humanities: Environmental Futures Writing Workshop. (1 Unit)
Bringing the traditional focus of the humanities–questions of meaning, value, ethics, justice and the politics of knowledge production–into environmental domains calls for a radical reworking of a great deal of what we think we know about ourselves and our fields of inquiry. Inhabiting the difficult space of simultaneous critique and action, this course will re-imagine the proper questions and approaches of the humanities, asking how our accumulated knowledge and practice might be refashioned to meet current environmental challenges, to productively rethink ‘the human’ in more than human terms. In order to resituate the human within the environment, and to resituate nonhumans within cultural and ethical domains, we will draw on a range of texts and films, and engage in a range of critical and creative practices of our own. Critical Interpretation (CI); Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC). Writing in the major/ Intensive. Prerequisite: ENVS H101 or B101. (hard check prerequisite). Enrollment cap: 18. Lottery Preference(s): Senior ENVS majors, Junior ENVS majors, Sophomores, first-year students. Minors and non-majors by instructor's permission.
ENVS B204 Place, People and Praxis in Environmental Studies (1 Unit)
This course offers a cross-disciplinary introduction to community-based learning. Working with local community groups, students will learn the fundamental skills of praxis work applied to environmental issues within an inquiry-based framework. Pre-requisite: ENVS B101 or ENVS H101 and (ENVS B202, H202, B203, or H203) or instructor's permission.
ENVS B330 Organizing for Climate Action (0.5 Unit)
To win climate action, you need more than good science, accurate data, and bold ideas. You need power. Behind the scenes of social movements, organizers are setting clear goals, building relationships, and creating meaningful opportunities for others to express their values together. A central premise of this class is that policymaking and social change takes strategic campaigning. Whether you aim to lead campus organizations more effectively, influence public policy, or grow a grassroots movement for a more just and sustainable future, this course will help you develop practical skills for mobilizing collective action.
ENVS B350 Advanced Topics in Environmental Studies (1 Unit)
This is a topics course. Course content varies.
ENVS B397 Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies (1 Unit)
This capstone Environmental Studies course is designed to allow Environmental Studies seniors to actively engage in environmental problem solving. Students bring the perspectives and skills gained from their ENVS focus area and from their preparatory work in the major/minor to collaborate on interdisciplinary projects
ENVS B403 Independent Study (1 Unit)
ENVS B425 Praxis III: Independent Study (1 Unit)
ANTH B244 Global Perspectives on Early Farmers and Social Change (1 Unit)
Throughout most of human history, our ancestors practiced lifestyles centered on gathering wild plants and hunting non-domesticated animals. Today, however, a globalized agricultural economy supports a population of over eight billion people. The widespread adoption of agriculture changed the course of history and is described by many as the most consequential cultural transition ever undertaken by humans. This course draws on information produced by archaeologists around the world to examine this major historical shift, while asking big questions such as: What impact did the adoption of agriculture have on past communities and cultures, and how did farming spread to different world regions? Did farming contribute to population growth, inequality, urbanization, and/or warfare? Did it set the stage for our own societies today?
ANTH B251 Identity, Borders, and Globalization in Southeast Asia (1 Unit)
This course will explore the complexity and diversity of Southeast Asia and the ways political, economic, and environmental concerns bridge borders of countries in the region. We will examine belief systems, family systems, urbanization, economic change, politics and governance, health, and ecological change, among other topics. We will critically examine colonial, anti-colonial, nationalist, and internationalist meanings by looking at lived experiences that question what does it mean to be bound by regional designation and simultaneously participate in processes of one’s own making that challenge and transcend locality. Through reading ethnographies of cultures in the region, we also will examine anthropologies and knowledge being produced outside of the Western academy in Southeast Asia, problematize area studies and the Western construction of a geopolitical region of nation-states called Southeast Asia, and examine the limits of such a designation, as well as benefits as countries in the region that engage in ASEAN contend with globalization. Prerequisite: Sophomore Standing and Above.
ANTH B254 Anthropology and Social Science Research Methods (1 Unit)
This course is designed for students interested in learning ethnographic and qualitative social science methods, and how to analyze qualitative results. Through hands on fieldwork, students will learn and practice ethnographic field methods, for example, observation, participant observation, interviewing, use of visual media and drawing, life stories, generating and analyzing data, and ways to productively transform qualitative data into contextual information. Ethics in ethnographic research will be a central theme, as will envisioning and designing projects that protect human subjects. The purpose of this course is to provide anthropology majors and students in social sciences, humanities, as well as STEM majors with interests in multi-method research, an opportunity to learn methods in advance of their thesis proposal and research, Hanna Holborn Gray summer research, and other social science independent research opportunities during their undergraduate experience, and post-graduation.
ANTH B291 Archaeology of Human-Environment Interaction (1 Unit)
For the entirety of our history, humans have been interacting with, responding to, and shaping our environment. In this course, we will discuss how archaeologists study and think about the ways in which people across the globe have engaged with their environments. We will begin with an overview of how archaeologists and anthropologists have theorized about human-environmental interactions. The course will then focus on three methodological frameworks used by archaeologists to study these interactions: geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, and paleoethnobotany. Students will have the opportunity to study how archaeologists employ these methods together to better understand the relationships between people and the environments in which they live.
ANTH B293 Extractive Violence and Environmental Justice (1 Unit)
This course will introduce students to the study of environmental justice and examine questions of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and inequality within the political ecology of extractive capitalism. Through ethnographic accounts, documentary film, graphic novels, photography and other multimedia, we will examine case studies of environmental justice, conflicts over resources, and the impacts of extractive industries on indigenous and other frontline communities across the Global South and North. How does ecological toxicity manifest as a form of racialized violence deployed across post-colonial geographies? Why do hydrocarbons produce “modern democracy” in some places and “petro-despotism” in others? How do we make sense of our position in a global political ecology of resource extraction? This course will unfold in three parts: the first will situate the problem of environmental justice within the broader context of humans’ impacts on global ecologies; the second will examine the historical context of extractive capitalism; and the third will examine the problem of environmental justice as a legacy of postcolonialism. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and up; Anth 102 recommended/suggested.
ANTH B352 Humans and Non-Humans (1 Unit)
Anthropology is the study of humans, but the idea of the “human” always implies the category of the “non-human.” Humanity is defined in its relation to “non-humans”: ranging from tools and technology, to domesticated (and undomesticated) animals, to agricultural crops, our local ecologies, and the global environment. What does it mean to be human? What is the agency of non-humans in human worlds? Do forests think? Do dogs dream? What is the agency of a mountain? What are the rights of a river? What is the cultural significance of DNA? This course will trace Anthropological debates over the “human” and “non-human” in contexts ranging from Amerindian cosmology, to political ecology, and science and technology studies.
ANTH B354 Political Economy, Gender, Ethnicity and Transformation in Vietnam (1 Unit)
Today, Vietnam is in the midst of dramatic social, economic and political changes brought about through a shift from a central economy to a market/capitalist economy since the late 1980s. These changes have resulted in urbanization, a rise in consumption, changes in land use, movement of people, environmental consequences of economic development, and shifts in social and economic relationships and cultural practices as the country has moved from low income to middle income status. This course examines culture and society in Vietnam focusing largely on contemporary Vietnam, but with a view to continuities and historical precedent in past centuries. In this course, we will draw on anthropological studies of Vietnam, as well as literature and historical studies. Relationships between the individual, family, gender, ethnicity, community, land, and state will pervade the topics addressed in the course, as will the importance of political economy, nation, and globalization. In addition to class seminar discussions, students will view documentary and fictional films about Vietnamese culture. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or higher or first years with ANTH 102.
ANTH B355 Archaeology of Landscapes (1 Unit)
Traditional archaeology has focused on the “archaeological site” in our attempts to understand past human practices. However, people in the past as with today did not live their lives within the small confines of an archaeological site but rather in the broader landscape surrounding them. In this seminar, students will gain an understanding of different theoretical and methodological approaches to studying the landscape. Using case studies from around the world, we will explore how archaeologists study the ways past people interacted with, modified, and experienced the landscapes in which they dwelt. In doing so, students will gain an appreciation for how the study of landscapes can improve our understanding of peoples lived experiences.
ANTH B364 Anthropology of Global Public Health (1 Unit)
This course will use an anthropological lens to explore the field of contemporary global public health. Through readings and ethnographic case studies in cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, applied and critical anthropology, and related social sciences, the class will examine the participants and institutions that make up the production of global health, as well as the knowledge, and value production that have shaped agendas, policies and practices in global health, both historically and in the contemporary. The course will also explore anthropology’s relationship to and perspectives on the history of global health. We will examine how local communities, local knowledge and political forces intersect with, shape, and are shaped by global initiatives to impact diseases, treatments, and health care delivery. As well, what the effects are on individuals, families and children, communities, urban and rural areas, and nations. Among other topics, the course will explore health disparities, epidemics/pandemics, global mental health, climate change and infectious diseases, chronic illness, violence, and diseases such as polio, HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, Tuberculosis, etc. Prerequisite(s): ANTH B102/H103 recommended; sophomore standing or higher
BIOL B230 Ecological Exiles and Sustainability (1 Unit)
The fossil record writes a natural history of forced past migrations of organisms due to physiological intolerances of shifting climatic conditions. These paleo stories of ecological exiles provide an informative backdrop for our own species as we grapple with the potential of becoming ecological exiles ourselves within our own lifetimes based on projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For instance, the 2018 World Bank Report projects that climate change could force over 140 million people to migrate by 2050. Actions in support of sustainability initiatives are imperative to the health and well being of our species as we grapple with the status quo and the challenge of environmental injustices. This workshop-based course will begin with the concept of ecological exiles then consider how local initiatives on campus and beyond can help us to work towards global goals for sustainable development. For students enrolled in the Russophone Diaspora 360 cluster, the concept of ecological exiles will be enriched by considering the literature and lived experiences of Russophone émigrés.
BIOL B262 Urban Ecosystems (1 Unit)
Cities can be considered ecosystems whose functions are highly influenced by human activity. This course will address many of the living and non-living components of urban ecosystems, as well as their unique processes. Using an approach focused on case studies, the course will explore the ecological and environmental problems that arise from urbanization, and also examine solutions that have been attempted. Prerequisite: BIOL B110 or B111 or ENVS B101.
BIOL B323 Coastal and Marine Ecology (1 Unit)
An interdisciplinary course exploring the ecological, biogeochemical, and physical aspects of coastal and marine ecosystems. We will compare intertidal habitats in both temperate and tropical environments, with a specific emphasis on global change impacts on coastal systems (e.g. sea level rise, warming, and species shifts). Lecture three hours, laboratory three hours per week. In 2020 the course will have a mandatory field trip to a tropical marine field station and an overnight field trip to a temperate field station in the mid-Atlantic. Prerequisite: BIOL B220 or BIOL B225.
CITY B190 Form of the City: Histories of the Built Environment (1 Unit)
This course studies the city as a three-dimensional artifact. A variety of factors, geography, economic and population structure, politics, planning, and aesthetics are considered as determinants of urban form.
CITY B201 Introduction to GIS for Social and Environmental Analysis (1 Unit)
This course is designed to introduce the foundations of GIS with emphasis on applications for social and environmental analysis. It deals with basic principles of GIS and its use in spatial analysis and information management. Ultimately, students will design and carry out research projects on topics of their own choosing. Prerequisite: At least sophomore standing and Quantitative Readiness are required (i.e.the quantitative readiness assessment or Quan B001).
CITY B377 Topics in Modern Architecture (1 Unit)
This is a topics course on modern architecture. Topics vary.
EALC B353 The Environment on China's Frontiers (1 Unit)
This seminar explores environmental issues on China’s frontiers from a historical perspective. It focuses on the particular relationship between the environment and the frontier, examining how these two variables have interacted. The course will deal with the issues such as the relationship between the environment and human ethnic and cultural traditions, social movements, economic growth, political and legal institutions and practices, and changing perceptions. The frontier regions under discussion include Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and the southwestern ethnic areas, which are all important in defining what China is and who the Chinese are.
ENGL B293 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Medieval Ecologies (1 Unit)
This course explores relationships between natural, non-human, and human agents in the Middle Ages. Reading natural philosophy, vernacular literature, and theological treatises, we examine how the Middle Ages understood supposedly "modern" environmental concepts like climate change, sustainability, animal rights, and protected land.
ENGL B293 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Medieval Ecologies (1 Unit)
This course explores relationships between natural, non-human, and human agents in the Middle Ages. Reading natural philosophy, vernacular literature, and theological treatises, we examine how the Middle Ages understood supposedly "modern" environmental concepts like climate change, sustainability, animal rights, and protected land.
ENGL B372 Black Ecofeminism(s): Critical Approaches (1 Unit)
How have Black feminist authors and traditions theorized or represented the ecological world and their relationship to it? How does thinking intersectionally about gender(ing) and racialization expand or challenge conventional notions of “nature,” conservation, or environmental justice? In what ways does centering racial blackness critically reframe a host of practical and philosophical questions historically brought together under the sign “ecofeminism?” Combining history and theory, the humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary course will use the work of Black feminist writers (broadly defined) across a range of genres to approach and to trouble the major paradigms and problems of contemporary Euro-American ecofeminist thought. The course uses fiction and poetry by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen as a gateway to a range of critical work by Jennifer Morgan, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Mies, and Val Plumwood as it attempts to define and deconstruct what Chelsea Frazier calls “Black Feminist Ecological Thought.”
GEOL B104 The Science of Climate Change (1 Unit)
A survey of the science behind climate change. Students will analyze climate data, read primary scientific literature, examine the drivers of climate change, and investigate the fundamental Earth processes that are affected. We will also examine deep-time climate change and the geologic proxies that Earth scientists use to understand climate change on many different time scales. This course is appropriate for students with little to no scientific background but is geared toward students who are considering a science major. Two 90-minute lectures per week.
GEOL B108 Earth's Oceans: Past, Present, and Future (1 Unit)
This course is designed to expose students to the fundamentals of oceanography with an emphasis on how Earth’s oceans are tied to life and climate and how we study these links in the present and in the fossil record. We will spend much time understanding how the modern ocean works and how biogeochemical cycles interact with it. A major focus will be how we can use the ocean’s past and present to make predictions about its future. This is a flipped course in which students study pre-recorded presentations outside of class. Class time is devoted to labs, demonstrations, and other activities.
GEOL B203 Biosphere Through Time (1 Unit)
We will explore how the Earth-life system has evolved through time by studying the interactions between life, climate, and tectonic processes. During the lab component of the course, we will study important fossil groups to better understand their paleoecology and roles in the Earth-life system. Prerequisite: GEOL B101, GEOL B108, or GEOL B209.
GERM B259 Unnatural Encounters: The Environment in German Literature (1 Unit)
Germany is recognized as world leader in innovative sustainability practices and has long been a site of social and political organization around the environment. This course will explore encounters with and in the natural world in German literature, film, and the visual arts as reflections of or agents of social, political, and technological change. While these encounters are rooted in the philosophical divide between self and world, they embody questions of gender, urbanism, preservation, alienation, marginalization, and “homeland” in ways that galvanize political and social movements locally and nationally, real and imagined. The course is centered on different loci of encounters with the environment, including forests of fairy tales, coastlines and rivers, mountains, mines, agricultural and industrialized urban spaces. It will also consider the human-made environment, waste, and energy sources as places of encounter and transformation.
HART B220 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Landscapes, Art, & Racial Ecologies (1 Unit)
This course is writing intensive. This course uses art, visual, and material culture to trace the plantation’s centrality to colonial and post-colonial environments in the Atlantic World from the eighteenth century to the present, as a site of environmental destruction as well as parallel ecologies engendered by African-descended peoples’ aesthetic and botanical contestation. Objects to be considered include landscape painting, plantation cartography, scientific imagery, environmental art, and ecologically motivated science fiction. This course was formerly numbered HART B111; students who previously completed HART B111 may not repeat this course. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.
HIST B203 The High Middle Ages (1 Unit)
We’re becoming used to the idea of environmental crisis. Drought, floods, storms, and extinctions constantly remind us that humans can be terrifyingly effective at shaping the world in which we live. But the interplay between human agents and the rest of the world is as old as humanity. This course explores how people in the European Middle Ages – mostly the peasants left out of the history books – lived with and made decisions about limited natural resources, looming overexploitation, customary common rights, and shared responsibilities, all within the narrow margins which characterized their immediate and taxing relationship with their landscapes. The period is alien in many ways: it was an age of faith, oaths, and lordship. Horsepower was measured in literal horses (or in human muscle). But the decisions its people made, and the assumptions they held, have shaped our own world in ways we don’t always see. How did people in another age work within the constraints set by their environments? How did they change those environments to suit their desires? And whose desires were being pursued? Who was left out? Through attention to cultivation, climates, plague, and human conceptions of the natural world, we’ll consider these questions, and seek to gain glimpses of the human-to-human and human-to-non-human relationships that dominated the medieval experience.
INST B201 Themes in International Studies (1 Unit)
This is a topics course. Course content varies.
INST B220 Political Ecology and Environmental Justice (1 Unit)
This course is an introduction to the fields of Political Ecology and Environmental Justice. Through ethnographic accounts, documentary film, graphic novels, photography and other multimedia, students will be introduced to ethnographic case studies of environmental justice struggles, conflicts over resources, and the impacts of extractive industries on indigenous and other frontline communities across the Global South and North. How, we will ask, do environmental problems, such as climate change, pollution and toxicity, biodiversity loss and extinctions, and struggles over resource extraction intersect with questions of identity and inequality, such as race, ethnicity, nation, indigeneity, and gender? Students will make use of the theoretical and methodological tools offered by environmental justice and political ecology to critically examine: processes of globalization, development, and the racialized postcolonial geographies of resource extraction; the problem of environmental racism, and social movements for indigenous sovereignty and climate justice; and science and technology studies inquiries into the relations between humans and non-humans. Together, we will trace the historical roots, colonial logics, and contemporary effects of extractive capitalism and learn from the legacies of movements social and environmental justice in order to interrogate our own positionality within the global political ecology of resource extraction and consumption. Prerequisite: Intro to International Studies recommended as preparation
POLS B256 Global Politics of Climate Change (1 Unit)
This course will introduce students to important political issues raised by climate change locally, nationally, and internationally, paying particular attention to the global implications of actions at the national and subnational levels. It will focus not only on specific problems, but also on solutions; students will learn about some of the technological and policy innovations that are being developed worldwide in response to the challenges of climate change. Only open to students in 360 program.
POLS B326 Comparative Environmental Politics in East and Southeast Asia (1 Unit)
East Asia (referring to both Northeast and Southeast Asia) is often discussed as one unit vis-à-vis other economic blocs yet this region is a home to the largest population in the world with various divergent cultures, colonial histories, religions, political system and state-society relations, as well as the level of economic development. With increasing focus on 3Es— Economic growth, Environment protection, and Energy security— as shared priorities at the regional level, such diversities serve not only as opportunities but challenges for East Asian states to cope with environmental issues. Geographic proximity makes countries in the region environmentally interdependent, and heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels make energy security as a matter of survival. Increasing public outcry over pollution and resultant health problems has also challenged political legitimacy and sustainable economic development. his course explores contemporary environmental issues in East Asia from comparative political economy perspective and sheds light on how environmental problems – and solutions – are often shaped by political context and interweaved into varying actors’ perceived interest. Main questions in the course include: What kind of environmental problems East Asia face and how diverse historical, political and economic conditions of each country shape the context in which countries deal with the problem either individually or collectively? What are the roles of various social, political and market actors in environmental politics? What sorts of approaches seem most likely to solve local, national and regional environmental issues such as air pollution, natural resource depletion, and climate change? What are the impacts of globalization and technological innovation in dealing with environmental issues? Prerequisite: Junior standing or higher, previous courses in social science, humanities, area studies or relevant experiences are required. This course meets writing intensive requirement.
POLS B331 Environmental Security (1 Unit)
The course explores the effects of environmental pressures on the outbreak of conflict and the rise of both internal and international migration. The course covers how pressures from decreased food and water, as well as natural disasters, floods, and droughts may lead to increases and decreases in conflict and migration as well as other political outcomes related to security.
RUSS B220 Chornobyl (1 Unit)
This course introduces students to the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, its consequences, and its representations across a range of cultures and media through a comparative lens and as a global phenomenon. Culture meets ecology, science, history, and politics. Students will contribute to a digital exhibition and physical installation. Taught in translation. No knowledge of Russian required.
RUSS B227 Eurasia and its Ecology: Cultural & Historical Perspectives (1 Unit)
This course will explore the historical, social, and cultural significance of the environment in Russian literature and the visual arts. As the largest country on the planet and as a sprawling nation that covers almost a sixth of the world’s land mass, Russia has both cherished and exploited its vast forests and ample natural resources. Exploring Russian culture from an ecological perspective, we will delve into the fiction, poetry, cinema, and photography that has raised environmental issues or, in the opposite vein, has promoted rapid industrial development and a swift taming of Russia’s natural landscape for the sake of progress. To this day, Russian artists continue to grapple with the ecological state of the country and its fragile well-being.
RUSS B232 Coal, Oil, Nuclear: Narrative Afterlives (1 Unit)
Coal. Oil. Nuclear energy. These items give shape to our everyday lives in countless ways. They impact our health, our politics, and our very survival on earth.. Nevertheless, because these resources permeate nearly every aspect of our existence, the human mind can struggle to comprehend them in their totality. In this course, we’ll explore texts that engage with our environment to help us bring humans’ relationship to these materials into focus. Scientific, historical, and economic studies tend to focus on their scale and widespread impact. Reading stories, watching
RUSS B234 Ecological Displacement in Russophone Literature (1 Unit)
Our era of immense environmental upheaval is striking in its urgency and scale, but it is, of course, far from unprecedented. In this class, we’ll consider the effects of ecological displacement, both real and imagined as portrayed in Russophone literature; its ties to solastalgia, nostalgia, and the condition of exile; art as a form of conservation; and historical and environmental issues in the region.
SPAN B239 Escribir la naturaleza: Animales y plantas en la literatura latinoamericana (1 Unit)
What role does literature play in this age of ecological crisis and natural disasters? How has literature often mediated the relationships between the human and the non-human? How does nature writings in Latin America reflect, problematize and criticize the intense “geological fault” of anthropocentrism? From the earliest days of the exploration and conquest of the American continent, the texts of the Europeans set a repertoire of obsessions in which looking at or imagining nature became a constant. Plants and animals, since then, became a recurring topic. Described first as wonders or horrors, with time they will be scientifically and politically loaded. By the 20th century, the fictionalization of plants and animals has been one of the central concerns of Latin American literature, opening, thus, a fertile ground for textual explorations from the perspective of ecocriticism. This course will analyze the place of plants and animals in Latin American literature: how they reveal the relationships between the human and the environment (the landscape and other non-human life forms). We will explore, then, the place of the zoological and botanical at the heart of some of the literary proposals of many different authors who invite us to think about the multiple tensions between human and non-human, nature and culture, ecology and aesthetics, science and literature.This course will be taught in Spanish.