Race and the Politics of Nature: Intersecting Histories and Political Ecologies

Catalog description

This senior seminar examines the ongoing perpetuation of race and racism as fundamentally related to concepts of “nature” and “the natural.” We examine scientific and pseudoscientific concepts about population, biology, and resource scarcity, western environmentalism’s origins and history, and relations with projects of incarceration, border violence, triage, environmental determinism, dehumanization, and the maintenance of essentialist understandings of ‘race.’ This course centralizes a critical race studies lens towards the history of environmental injustices, while also querying in what way nature, ecology, or environmentalism might be liberatory projects for racial justice.