Nature, Culture, Environment

In this course, we examine the pernicious yet changing relationships between people, infrastructures and the environment that have produced the climate crisis. Drawing together classic texts and some of the newest debates in the field of Environmental Anthropology, we focus on the social processes through which different groups of persons imagine and produce both the catastrophes of the climate crisis, as well as projects to address its most durable effects.

The course will begin by reviewing the ways in which the environment is 'cultured'; the ways in which it is imagined and inhabited by diverse peoples around the world. In the second part of the course, we turn to political ecology, exploring how the durable histories with which racial capitalism and coloniality have rendered environments precarious. Here, we also focus on how the environment becomes the terrain for environmental justice struggles by black, brown and indigenous communities. In the third and final section of the course, we will move past disciplinary renderings of nature and culture to examine how lives are being lived otherwise in the vital ecologies of the Anthropocene.