ANTH 1500 - Environment, Justice, and Well-Being

Crosslisted: Also listed as ECST 1500

Goals: This course considers the conditions that make it possible for people – and societies, and our more-than-human neighbors – to live together on Earth in the longer term. Surveying the conditions of global crises such as climate change and environmental injustices, as well as exploring how those crises make us feel and treat each other, our readings, discussions, and in-class collaborative projects help us understand what it will take to care for the Earth as home as we move together into the future.

Content: We explore socio-cultural, economic, and political relationships from the perspectives of anthropology and environmental studies to better understand how we have arrived, globally, at profound disparities in wealth, health, life expectancy, population density, and access to opportunity and hope. In contrast, we explore global grocery chains and land commons projects to understand how people are rebuilding these systems, and to practice creating and sharing instructions for “planetary home care.” Drawing broadly on contemporary literature from geography, economics, political science, rural sociology, anthropology, and Afro- and Indigenous futurisms, this course helps prepare students to grapple with some of the more challenging issues of our post-colonial world, with its global division of labor, cultures of consumption-as-self-soothing, differential poverty and privilege, intellectual property battles, increasing systemic instabilities in the face of climate crisis and pandemics, and social responses to global connectivity. Course comes with Planetary playlist.

Credits: 4