ANTH 376 - Situating Climate Change

The latest manifestation of humanity’s self-induced existential threats emerges in the form of climate change: a planetary-scale phenomenon that profoundly impacts both humans and nonhumans across the board in fundamental ways. Yet climate change, its effects, and the consequences of its mitigation strategies are experienced differently in different places and communities. As such, climate change evokes a curious moment, simultaneously reviving old inequalities, binaries, debates, tensions, divisions, and reflexes while presenting opportunities to transcend them and forge new collaborations and alliances. This course seeks to sociopolitically and spatiotemporally situate this moment by approaching climate change not as a singularity, but as a multiplicity: a complex, multifaceted, and heterogeneously distributed crisis with diverse voices and perspectives. By exploring a range of political, ecological, scientific, humanistic, and more-than-humanistic themes-such as the dichotomies of nature versus culture, facts versus fictions, science versus art, and “hard” versus “soft” sciences, as well as the concepts of post-truth, technofix, and climate change mitigation as a neocolonial practice-this course aims to develop a transdisciplinary approach to better understand the climate crisis.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 201 or ANTH 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.