ANTHR 4417 - Ecopolitics

(crosslisted) AMST 4417
(SSC-AS)

Spring. 3 credits. Student option grading.

Preferred prerequisite: an introductory anthropology course or experience with environmental humanities. Co-meets with AMST 7417/ANTHR 7417.

C. Ahmann, A. Bize.

At this time of planetary instability, all politics are environmental politics. But all environmental politics are not the same. Contemporary movements diverge around key questions: Is technology an environmental boon or an environmental bad? Can sustainable ends be achieved through capitalist means? Who should be endowed with the power to intervene? At what scale, in what ways, on whose behalf? Reading across different ecopolitical formations—conservation, green capitalism, ecosocialism, ecofascism, and more—we ask how “the environment” manages to contain such a capacious field, why it so thoroughly deranges usual political coordinates. Then, we hone tools for thinking critically and hopefully within the mess.