Material Lives: Consumption, Accumulation, and The Environment

Catalog description

Our things make up the tangible artifacts of our lives and account for much of our impact on the planet. At a larger scale, our possessions, and how we use, store, and discard them, offer key insights into our society’s relationship with nature. In this course we use quantitative and qualitative approaches to study how household-level consumption and accumulation have changed over time. We examine how industrialization, globalization, and capitalism have enabled these changes at the societal level, and explore the emotional dimensions, considering how societal narratives shape individuals’ desires, expectations, and behavior and what these may reveal about broader societal anxieties.