Intersectional Ecologies

Catalog description

How might understandings of "the environment" change depending on who is included or excluded from projects to define, identify, and study the environment, biodiversity, ecological systems, natural resources, or more-than-human life? This course is an introduction to the critical concept of “intersectionality” and an exploration of its potential to transform understandings of “the environment”. In this course, students are exposed to the concept as an intervention in the foundational assumptions of mainstream environmental studies and science. Through engagement with a wide variety of scholarship, students will explore how an Intersectional Ecologies approach can help scholars and practitioners across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences ethically account for a plurality of environments within shifting planetary arrangements of bodies, beings, places, processes, practices, and technologies.