2019-20 Yearly Course Planner
All of the following courses fulfill the Environmental Policy and Culture minor. This list does not include discussion sections. For a list of elective courses from which to choose, visit the Course Descriptions page. For more information, including course descriptions, visit CAESAR.
Course # | Course Title | Fall | Winter | Spring |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENVR_POL 101 | First-Year Seminar: Chicago Environmental Justice | Rosenzweig | ||
ENVR_POL 101 First-Year Seminar: Chicago Environmental JusticeThe concept of environmental justice in the United States emerged in the early 1980s as African-American residents fought hazardous waste sites planned in and around their communities. Since then, the environmental justice perspective has been expanded to include the struggles of other minority groups disenfranchised on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or class. In the first part of the course, students will learn about the history of the environmental justice movement in the US and its development. Next, the course will take a closer look at environmental justice in Chicago, both past and present. A mandatory field trip to a local environmental justice organization is part of the course. | ||||
ENVR_POL 212 | Thistle | |||
ENVR_POL 212 | ||||
ENVR_POL 309 | American Environmental History | Woodhouse | ||
ENVR_POL 309 American Environmental HistoryThis course will survey American history from the colonial era to the present with two premises in mind: that the natural world is not simply a passive background to human history but rather an active participant, and that human attitudes toward nature are both shaped by and in turn shape social, political, and economic behavior. The course will cover formal schools of thought about the natural world - from transcendentalism to the conservation and environmental movements - but also discuss the many informal intersections of human activity and natural systems, from European colonialism to property regimes, migration and transportation, industry, consumer practices, war, technological innovation, political ideology, and food production. Taught with History 309; students may not receive credit for both courses. | ||||
ENVR_POL 336 | Climate Change, Policy and Society | Thistle | ||
ENVR_POL 336 Climate Change, Policy and SocietyClimate change is the worst environmental problem facing the earth. Sea levels will rise, glaciers are vanishing, horrific storms will hit everywhere. After looking briefly at the impacts of climate change on natural and social environments both in the present and near future, we then consider how to best reduce climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. Issues of climate | ||||
ENVR_POL 390 | Art, Ecology and Politics | Zorach | ||
ENVR_POL 390 Art, Ecology and Politics | ||||
ENVR_POL 390 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture: Political Ecology | Rosenzweig | ||
ENVR_POL 390 Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture: Political EcologyThis class is an introduction to Political Ecology, a multidisciplinary body of theory and research that analyzes the environmental articulations of political, economic, and social difference and inequality. The key concepts, debates, and approaches in this field address two main questions: (1) How do humans' interactions with the environment shape power and politics? (2) How do power and politics shape humans' interactions with the environment? These questions are critical to understanding and addressing the current issues of climate change, the Anthropocene, and environmental justice. Topics discussed in this class will include environmental scarcity and degradation, sustainability and conservation. Readings will come from the disciplines of geography, anthropology | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-20 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Fire and Blood: Resources, Energy and Society | Oguz | ||
ENVR_POL 390-20 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Fire and Blood: Resources, Energy and Society | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-21 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Int'l Environmental Law and Policy | Burns | ||
ENVR_POL 390-21 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Int'l Environmental Law and PolicyGlobal environmental problems, including the looming threat of climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and increasing pressures on ocean ecosystems due to human activities, have become pressing concerns in recent decades. In response, a sophisticated structure of global governance has emerged, including through the establishment of hundreds of multi-lateral treaties to confront these threats. As a consequence, nation-States have begun to cooperate with each other to an unprecedented extent, although not without facing significant obstacles, and not without domestic political agendas sometimes delaying or thwarting progress at the international level. This class examines the array of legal regimes, politics, governance processes | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-21 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture: Environmental Anthropology | Rosenzweig | ||
ENVR_POL 390-21 Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture: Environmental AnthropologyAnthropology has had a long, storied relationship with questions of nature and culture, society and environment, during which time a variety of theoretical approaches have been developed. This class will review these intellectual developments and recent trends with the aim of giving students toolkits for analyzing present-day environmental concerns. | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-22 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Climate Change Law and Policy | Burns | ||
ENVR_POL 390-22 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Climate Change Law and Policy | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-22 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture: Earth, Politics, and Poetics | Oguz | ||
ENVR_POL 390-22 Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture: Earth, Politics, and PoeticsPlanet Earth” has a political and social history. The Copernican turn and geological notions of deep time, for example, radically shifted understandings of the Earth, time, and humans’ relationship to them. Whole Earth images first generated by the Apollo Space missions in the late 1960s and 1970s have been the characteristic form of planetary imagination during the late twentieth century. Earthrise and The Blue Marble images enabled humans to imagine the planet as an interconnected whole against the backdrop of the Cold War and environmental disasters. They have been crucial to the emergence of a “global consciousness” and became famous icons of the global environmental movement, depicting the planet as the common home of humans as one species. The power of these images has not decreased, yet other forms of representation and imagination have emerged as well. The development of Google Earth or advanced climate modeling systems, for example, mark a different notion of Earth, characterized by dynamic, heterogeneous, and open systems. This course examines such shifting notions of the Earth by tracing how practices and discourses of geopolitics, political theory, cartography, population studies, climate modeling, deep ocean sensing, outer space exploration and mining, and science fiction literature, have come to sense, know, represent, and imagine the planet since the 18th century. In doing so, this course also surveys shifting socio-political currents, from the intersection of the military-industrial complex and technoscience to how climate crisis, Anthropocene debates, and Earth Systems analysis reflect further shifts in the ways the planet is understood today. Tracing these shifts in planetary representation and imagination is also crucial to understanding how core concepts such as “humanity” and “species” are made and unmade. Understanding the deeply mediated processes behind planetary depictions is not only central to making sense of contemporary politics and policies that propose to shape the future, but also to imagining alternative worlds and futures beyond our grim ecological predicament. | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-23 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Maple Syrup and Climate Change | Suzukovich | ||
ENVR_POL 390-23 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Maple Syrup and Climate Change | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-23 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Ethics and the Environment | Horne | ||
ENVR_POL 390-23 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Ethics and the Environment | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-24 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Food and Immigration | BuscaƱan-Wiley | ||
ENVR_POL 390-24 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Food and ImmigrationYou have probably heard the saying, “you are what you eat.” This class argues that you are also where you eat. Immigration deeply shapes culinary practices and global food systems are often dependent upon migrant labor. This course explores what cuisine and movement can teach us about belonging within local and global communities by addressing questions such as: How do foodways and migratory trajectories influence individual and collective identities? What political, social, and economic activities shape food distribution and day-to-day eating customs? We will cover food-related topics such as labor, transnationalism, the environment, memory, authenticity, gender and much more. Class discussions will span historical and contemporary developments that gave rise to our modern industrial food system while focusing in particular on food culture and migration narratives. | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-24 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Ocean and Coastal Law and Policy | Burns | ||
ENVR_POL 390-24 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Ocean and Coastal Law and PolicyThis course focuses on laws, policies and the decision-making process related to coastal and ocean resources in the United States, and internationally. Through examination of treaties, statutes, cases, administrative materials, and academic articles, we will explore issues such as coastal land use, offshore energy, ocean pollution, the impacts of climate on ocean/coastal ecosystems, marine mammal conservation, and fisheries management. | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-25 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Tales of Oil and Water | Wolff | ||
ENVR_POL 390-25 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Tales of Oil and Water | ||||
ENVR_POL 390-25 | Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Media, Earth and Making a Difference | Taylor | ||
ENVR_POL 390-25 Special Topics in Environmental Policy & Culture: Media, Earth and Making a Difference |