Environmental Change: Ethnographic Perspectives

Catalog description

What can anthropology's concepts and methods help us understand about the ways people unevenly experience, govern, fuel or contest global environmental changes today? Focusing on sociocultural accounts and ethnographic films, we will examine contemporary realities such as global warming and the anthropology of hydrocarbons; water politics and privatization of nature; pollution and its governance; agricultural change and human health; nuclear disaster; biodiversity and deforestation; the microbiome and society; and the ways environmental science is being produced alongside its emerging markets. Students will learn to put debates about ecological change in dialogue with anthropological thought and tools from the environmental humanities.