1022401301 - Changing the Intellectual Climate

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?