Fall 2020

Public perceptions and attitudes concerning the causes and importance of globalwarming have changed. Global Climate Change provides a sound theoretical understanding of global warming through an appreciation of the Earth's climate system and how and why this has changed through time. We will describe progress in understanding of the human and natural drivers of climate change, climate pr0cesses and attribution, and estimates of projected future climate change. We will assess scientific, tehnical, and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.

This course fulfills the EH Minor Requirement in Natural Science Approaches to Environmental Inquiry. See the full minor requirements list.

This course looks at animals in the American past, to find out what a focus on an individual animal, a species, or a kind of animal (such as work animals, food animals, wildlife, zoo animals, pets and pests) can reveal by exposing the inner workings of different periods and events. When we make animals the focus of how we look at the past, things change. Making animals visible makes other things visible; hidden, surprising or even shocking aspects of the past appear.

Americans have always lived with and employed animals. They also have "thought with" animals, using animals to work out their understandings of society, nature and power. How Americans perceived, named, classified, behaved toward and worked with animals bares the workings of race, class and gender, uncovers power structures, and reveals environmental and legal choices. If we want to understand how the current world came to be, taking a critter approach to history provides a way to explain how we got to now. Changing our view of the past can change our ideas of what the present can be.

Though animals are everywhere in the past, they are often hidden from view. We will embark on a hunt for animals, foraging through historical writing, political documents, literature, and primary sources. We will watch movies, examine photographs and study cartoons. We will draw on knowledge from the fields of science, technology, health and environments, and employ the classifications of race, class, gender, nature and culture. We'll talk about evolution, domestication and wildlife. We will look at zoomorphism, when people or things are labeled as animals (calling people pigs or snakes, or talking about bull or bear stock markets), and anthropomorphism, when animals are thought of or portrayed as people. In this seminar, we'll begin with case studies from the nineteenth century, then start seeking the animals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Writing, much of it informal, will be a regular part of this course, as will research exercises. There will be different options for writing and for research projects. Course materials will focus on American history and society but projects and exercises may look at places and times from around the globe and across the centuries. 

This course fulfills the EH Minor Requirement in Social Science Approaches to Environmental Inquiry. See the full minor requirements list.

The idea of solving problems by collecting as much data as possible about them is an old dream that has recently been revitalized. This course examines the hunger for data from a historical and social perspective, seeking to understand when, why, and how the collection of vast amounts of data has come to seem valuable and desirable, sometimes in ways that exceed any reasonable expectation of utility or feasibility. Topics include state surveillance, online tracking, the quantified self, citizen science, civic hacking, human genomics, bioinformatics, and climate science.

This course fulfills the EH Minor in Social Science Approaches to Environmental Inquiry. See the full minor requirements list.

In less than half a decade, the idea that "nature" possesses inalienable rights akin to human rights has gone from a strictly theoretical concept to the basis of policy changes in several countries and U.S. municipalities. This seminar will introduce students to current legal, political, ethical, and practical debates about the implementation and impacts of granting "rights to nature" in these different contexts with a particular focus on the rights associated with bodies of water. We will begin by examining how the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) supported citizens of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania to write the world's first local "rights of nature" ordinance. We will then go on to compare the politics of "rights of nature" cases in Ecuador, New Zealand, India, and Colombia paying special attention to the cases of rivers. We will focus on the ways biocentric constitutional moves may transform concepts and understandings of environmental justice and socio-environmental conflicts. In particular, how the recognition of "nature" as a victim of war may transform understandings of violence, and hence, approaches to constructing peace and engaging and reparative and restorative practices within the larger framework of planetary and community efforts to mitigate climate change, deforestation, and the degradation of watersheds and wetlands. Lastly, we will explore the possibilities and tensions between community decision-making, the "rights of nature," and national level policies regarding the intensification of extractive activities and questions of territorial ordinance as they relate to mulitiple bodies of water.

This course fulfills the EH Minor Requirement in Social Science Approaches to Environmental Inquiry. See the full minor requirements list.

Water wars, deforestation, climate change. Amidst many uncertain crises, in this course we will explore the emergent relationship between people and the environment in different parts of the world. How do people access the resources they need to live? How, when and for whom does 'nature' come to matter? Why does it matter? And what analytical tools might we use to think, mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change? Drawing together classical anthropological texts and some of the emergent debates in the field of climate studies and environmental justice, in this class we focus on the social-ecological processes through which different groups of humans imagine, produce and inhabit anthropogenic environments. This course is a Ben Franklin Seminar.

This course fulfills the EH Minor Requirement in Social Science Approaches to Environmental Inquiry. See the full minor requirements list.

Soil is considered the "skin of the Earth", with interfaces between the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. It is a mixture of minerals, organic matter, gases, liquids and a myriad of organisms that can support plant life. As such, soil is a natural body that exists as part of the environment. This course will examine the nature, properties, formation and environmental functions of soil.

This course fulfills the EH Minor Requirement in Natural Science Approaches to Environmental Inquiry. See the full minor requirements list.

Whether you call it climatological science-fiction or #clifi, speculative fiction about anthropogenic climate change is becoming an important site for thinking, feeling, and warning about earth’s changing environments. In this class we’ll study a cluster of recent cli-fi novels that project a variety of climate scenarios—apocalyptic, utopian, and everything in between—into the future. We’ll also look at earlier fictions that explore humanity’s entanglement with non-human beings and environments, as well as at fictions that connect climate change in the present with scarce-resources, conflict, displacement, and environmental racism. Supplementary readings in the environmental humanities will introduce terms and concepts such as the Anthropocene, deep time, the great acceleration, the nonhuman turn, ecological grief, and climate justice. Primary texts by the likes of Octavia Butler, A. S. Byatt, Barbara Kingsolver, Nnedi Okorafor, Richard Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jesmyn Ward, Alexis Wright.

This course fulfills the EH Minor Requirement in Arts & Humanities Approaches to Environmental Inquiry. See the full minor requirements list.

Many scholars find it challenging to explain and present their work to nonacademic audiences. Moreover, too few of us are aware of opportunities to put our academic skills to work in the service of improving the communities around us. This seminar considers ways of addressing these challenges through an examination of the many varieties of public history (and public humanities more broadly). The course includes hands-on projects in the Philadelphia area—that is, as “hands-on” as circumstances will allow. 

Four primary themes orient the readings, discussions, and assignments of the course:

• Commemoration and Public Memory: What roles do public monuments, memorials, and other static forms of commemoration play in civic life in the 21st century? Is there a meaningful place for such commemorations? How can they better represent the contested civic values of our changing societies, and how can they better educate a variety of publics?
• Places and Presentation: How can museums, historic sites, and other arenas in which audiences encounter history become more relevant and appealing to diverse audiences?
• Authority: Who produces history for the public, in whose name, and based on what principles?
• Engagement: How can history and related disciplines make a difference in the world, on small, medium, and large scales? 

We wrestle with these themes through close exploration of two central topics: (1) the history of epidemics and public health and (2) the history of racial injustice and racial empowerment struggles. The focus of the research components of this class is primarily on these histories and public memory of them in Philadelphia, although readings and discussions cover other cities and countries extensively.

The ultimate objective of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is to stabilize greenhouse gases at a sufficiently low level and quickly enough to ensure that ecosystems “adapt naturally to climate change … food production is not threatened …[and that] economic development [can] proceed in a sustainable manner.” (Framework Convention on Climate Change, Article 2) Twenty three years after this convention was adopted, countries agreed to “strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty” by holding the Global Mean Temperature well-below 2 degrees (Paris Agreement, Article 2).

As part of this global goal, the Paris Agreement calls for increasing the “ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development”. While it is clear what is required to meet the first goal—rapidly decarbonize the economy and reach net-zero before mid-century—profound questions remain to be addressed to facilitate sufficient adaptation for people and natural systems.

This seminar is about this second goal of climate adaptation. There is essentially no philosophical literature about this topic, and, compared to the physical science and mitigation issues, comparatively little scholarly attention paid to this subject. We will work together in this seminar to begin building a philosophy of science literature on this topic that investigates the interfaces between physical and social science and the complex normative issues involved in climate adaptation actions. In addition to writing a standard seminar paper, students will be expected to work on a project that makes a substantial contribution to one or more of the intergovernmental climate processes.

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