STS 4413 - Environments, Disasters, Health

(crosslisted) BSOC 4413
(CA-AS, SCD-AS, SSC-AS)

Fall. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

Priority given to: seniors.

A. Chaudhuri.

Environments shape who we are. Environment is omnipresent, and sometimes seems timeless, yet what we experience around us is an outcome of centuries of making, reworking, and reconstructing. This course begins with readings that familiarize students with historically informed meanings and descriptions of the environment. By using examples drawn from different parts of the world, it then interrogates how relations between environmental disasters and health are mediated through social categories like class, gender, race, or caste. Broad topics include social justice and the environment, multispecies relations, nature-culture debates, slow violence, and environmental disasters and catastrophes.

Outcome 1: Familiarity with key concepts and current debates around the environment and environmental disasters

Outcome 2: Understand the relation between theory/ concepts and practice/empirical examples, and learn how concepts are contextual and how they change over time

Outcome 3: Identify how “scientific”, “cultural”, “political” ideas and practices are co-constituted

Outcome 4: Read/ experience inter-disciplinary materials and value knowledge from different sources

Outcome 5: Develop tools to think critically and be able to write complex ideas in structured and legible ways

Outcome 6: Be able to identify one’s own research topic and learn how to write a thesis statement/ argument