Hostile Environments: The Politics of Pollution in Global Perspective

Catalog description

Earth is an increasingly toxic planet. Fossil-fueled industrialization, chemical engineering, and resource-intensive consumerism have generated immense wealth, but they have also left long-term, cumulative legacies of toxic pollution and ecological harm. While these legacies affect everyone, their impacts are by no means evenly distributed. In this course, we will use the tools of anthropology, political ecology, and history to examine experiences of toxic exposure in different parts of the world, including Pittsburgh. Our analyses will ask how inequalities of race, class, gender, and ability shape exposure as well as how cultural differences create divergent understandings of ecology, health, and their interrelationship. We will consider, moreover, how these disparities shape what people know about pollution and whether/how they demand accountability for it. Cases we explore will range from acute industrial disasters (and their aftermath) to the harms experienced by other-than-human beings to the gradual, often invisible exposures that affect all of us to varying degrees. This course meets the Dietrich Gen Ed "Perspectives on Justice and Injustice" requirement. Course Website: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/history/