Imagining Sustainable Futures

Catalog description

What does it mean to build a sustainable future - and whose future are we talking about? This course explores sustainability as a political and cultural project shaped by struggles over race, gender, and power. From colonial conversation and the rise of sustainable development to Indigenous, Black, and feminist movements for environmental justice, we will trace how difference communities have fought to define and practice sustainability on their own terms. Students will investigate how sustainability can be both a tool of control and a source of resistance - used by powerful institutions to justify inequality but also reimagined by marginalized groups as a language of care, repair, and survival. We will connect global histories of empire and development to local examples, from California's "green" identity to urban and rural movements across the world. Readings and discussions draw from anthropology, history, and social movements to show how sustainability becomes entangled with markets and finance, faith and belonging, and the everyday labor of maintaining land, food, and water. Together we will ask: What does it mean to sustain life in unequal worlds? How might we imagine and build futures that are not only livable, but just?