1022401301 - Changing the Intellectual Climate
Due to its
social and ecological complexity, and its temporal and spatial grand scales,
climate change, now our new lifetime challenge, is a particularly daunting
task, conceptually, politically and scientifically. This seminar explores the possible
contribution of political ecology as a theoretical and practical framework in
anthropology and critical geography to understand and think global climate
change ways in which social scientists have adopted and/or interrogated a number of
concepts and keywords relating to the contemporary global environmental change
/ seminar explores with special focus on
Together,
these keywords form a climate change general vocabulary: a shared body of words
and meanings developing, overlapping, contradictory, changing and assimilating
in the course of general societal discussion in the past 15 years and longer. Among these concepts, the recent explosion of
critical social science literature on “the Anthropocene” is the most prominent
example of cross-disciplinary borrowing; further concepts such as resilience,
adaptation, and vulnerability are more recent keywords in the lexicons of
political ecology and cognate fields.
Our goal, in
this seminar , is to compose a set of “Keywords” for the Anthropocene. A
shared vocabulary of words and meaning delineating and contextualizing concepts
relevant to our own worlds and work. students will be able to articulate a
number of key debates around the origins, scale, and terminology of the
Anthropocene, and to position themselves in relation to ongoing academic
conversations about, climate justice, conservation, system thinking, and human
transformation of the global environment.
The Seminar is oriented around
three questions:
1) How have
critical social sciences and political ecology in particular deepened and
complicated biophysically-based understandings of climate change terms and
concepts?
2) Conversely,
how might discussions in the social sciences and the environmental humanities
benefit from engaging more carefully with the biophysical specifics of these
concepts?
3) Finally,
what does acknowledging the Anthropocene from these perspectives, mean for the
practice of both social and physical science and social political change going
forward?