Environment, Violence, Repair

Catalog description

Recent conversations in environmental justice foreground harm and repair, as the scope of environmental questions expands to include exposure, toxicity, war, and infrastructures. This seminar positions violence and repair as entry-points to an ethnographic understanding of environmental harm, disturbance, and change through an interdisciplinary body of work that includes environmental history and film. The course connects recent ethnographic accounts of exposure, extraction, and pollution to critiques of violence, imperialism, and statecraft, and asks about the possibilities and limitations of repair, refusal, and survival. Reading critical theory on violence next to environmental degradation opens up space to think and learn about how colonial and state projects terra/aqua-form the environment and lifeways and calls us to think critically about environmental struggles from the perspective of resistance, repair, and non-western and non-secular responses to disaster, disruption, and change.