Unnatural History: Embodiment and Inequality in the Making of "Nature"

Catalog description

Penetrated jungles, "mother" nature, and quests to preserve the redwoods"for hundreds of years, colonial agents have characterized environments in racialized, gendered, sexualized, classist, and ableist terms, anthropomorphizing nature along ongoing systems of inequality. This class traces shifting conceptualizations of nature from the early modern period to the present, focusing on how naturalists and scientists have described, collected, and displayed "new" environments and peoples while building extractive and exploitative natural history collections, from cabinets of curiosity to New York"s own American Museum of Natural History. By analyzing methodologies like classification, conservation, and scientific communication, we will discuss how divisions between the "natural" and the "unnatural" were created and made public in western cultures along unequal ideas about human bodies. Critical analyses of sources across multiple disciplines will inform conversations about knowledge production with the goal of interrogating how these power structures have produced silenced voices and long-lasting violences on both environments and the peoples inhabiting them. Using both primary and secondary sources produced from the early modern period on while conducting original research, students will learn how binary and reductive categories have been used and abused in colonial science and beyond.