Courses

ENVS B101 Introduction to Environmental Studies

Spring 2025

The course offers a cross-disciplinary introduction to environmental studies. Tracing an arc from historical analysis to practical engagement, distinctive approaches to key categories of environmental inquiry are presented: political ecology, earth science, energy, economics, public health, ecological design, sustainability, public policy, and environmental ethics. Basic concepts, such as thermodynamics, biodiversity, cost-benefit analysis, scale, modernization, enclosure, the commons, and situational ethics, are variously defined and employed within specific explorations of environmental challenges in the modern world. No divisional credit is awarded for this course at Haverford nor does the course satisfy any of the Bryn Mawr approaches to inquiry.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies.

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ENVS B202 Environment and Society

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

An exploration of the ways in which different cultural, economic, and political settings have shaped issue emergence and policy making. We examine the politics of particular environmental issues in selected countries and regions, paying special attention to the impact of environmental movements. We also assess the prospects for international cooperation in addressing global environmental problems such as climate change. Pre-requisite ENVS B101 or ENVS H101 or instructor's permission.

Current topic description: An exploration of the ways in which different cultural, economic, and political settings have shaped issue emergence and policy making. We examine the politics of particular environmental issues in selected countries and regions, paying special attention to the impact of environmental movements. We also assess the prospects for international cooperation in addressing global environmental problems such as climate change.

Writing Attentive

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Political Science.

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ENVS B203 Environmental Humanities: Environmental Futures Writing Workshop.

Not offered 2024-25

Bringing the traditional focus of the humanities-questions of meaning, value, ethics, justice and the politics of knowledge production-into environmental domains calls for a radical reworking of a great deal of what we think we know about ourselves and our fields of inquiry. Inhabiting the difficult space of simultaneous critique and action, this course will re-imagine the proper questions and approaches of the humanities, asking how our accumulated knowledge and practice might be refashioned to meet current environmental challenges, to productively rethink 'the human' in more than human terms. In order to resituate the human within the environment, and to resituate nonhumans within cultural and ethical domains, we will draw on a range of texts and films, and engage in a range of critical and creative practices of our own. Critical Interpretation (CI); Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC). Writing in the major/ Intensive. Prerequisite: ENVS H101 or B101. (hard check prerequisite). Enrollment cap: 18. Lottery Preference(s): Senior ENVS majors, Junior ENVS majors, Sophomores, first-year students. Minors and non-majors by instructor's permission.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies.

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ENVS B204 Place, People and Praxis in Environmental Studies

Fall 2024

This course offers a cross-disciplinary introduction to community-based learning. Working with local community groups, students will learn the fundamental skills of praxis work applied to environmental issues within an inquiry-based framework. Pre-requisite: ENVS B101 or ENVS H101 and (ENVS B202, H202, B203, or H203) or instructor's permission.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Praxis Program.

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ENVS B350 Advanced Topics in Environmental Studies

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Poetry and Planetary Memory
Section 001 (Spring 2024): Environmental Writing Workshop
Section 001 (Fall 2024): Eco Writing & Critical Making
Section 001 (Spring 2025): Carbon, Climate & Sea Level
Section 002 (Spring 2025): Climate Activism and Policy Change

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

Current topic description: Eco Writing & Critical Making: Just environmental futures require bold visioning in the vibrant and unknown space of "what if." Critical environmental making--from creative writing to natural materials workshops--often begins in this "what if" space, positioning these arts toward the yet unimagined nature of the world we inhabit. This advanced poetry and critical making workshop takes up a variety of creative practices, from ghazal and villanelle writing to plant dye experiments and papermaking from native plants.

Current topic description: Climate justice is an incomplete conversation and effort, if it is not a global one. How do the global south/the developing world/the global poor-contested, distinct, yet interchangeable categories-figure in popular and academic writing on climate change? Can there be a role for the global South in the climate justice conversation that goes beyond portraying it as always and only vulnerable, exploited, devasted, threatening? Through studying a range of manifestations of climate change, and adaptation to it, we will attend to the complex political, historical and ecological contexts within which mal/adaptation is mis/understood, inequality between the global North and South is exposed, and migration is racialized. We will explore how popular climate change imaginaries materialize in development and security programmes and literature, and bespeak charged geopolitical and racial histories. As a group we will reflect on what futures for working in common such imaginaries enable/constrain.

Current topic description: Just environmental futures require bold visioning, the kind of visioning that begins in the vibrant, vulnerable, and unknown space of "what if." The arts of poetry and nonfiction often begin in this what if space, positioning these genres toward the yet unknown, the unimagined, and the ever-becoming nature of the world we inhabit. This course is a semester-long, advanced environmental writing workshop that takes up writing's capacity for radical biospheric imaginings. Each member of the class will contribute three workshop pieces in their chosen genre, while reading and responding to professional writing. Pre-requisite, ENVS203, unless approved by the instructor.

Current topic description: TMuch of the academic literature on climate politics focuses on top-down policymaking at the national or global level. In this course we will flip that perspective, foregrounding climate activists, from local organizations to global networks, who have mobilized for bottom-up policy change. We will explore climate activism in a variety of countries and at all levels of policymaking. The course will feature conversations with activists, including BMC alumnae, who are working both inside and outside of government institutions to achieve meaningful policy change.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Political Science.

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ENVS B397 Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies

Not offered 2024-25

This capstone Environmental Studies course is designed to allow Environmental Studies seniors to actively engage in environmental problem solving. Students bring the perspectives and skills gained from their ENVS focus area and from their preparatory work in the major/minor to collaborate on interdisciplinary projects

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies.

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ENVS B403 Independent Study

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ENVS B425 Praxis III: Independent Study

Counts Toward: Praxis Program.

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ANTH B251 Identity, Borders, and Globalization in Southeast Asia

Not offered 2024-25

This course will explore the complexity and diversity of Southeast Asia and the ways political, economic, and environmental concerns bridge borders of countries in the region. We will examine belief systems, family systems, urbanization, economic change, politics and governance, health, and ecological change, among other topics. We will critically examine colonial, anti-colonial, nationalist, and internationalist meanings by looking at lived experiences that question what does it mean to be bound by regional designation and simultaneously participate in processes of one's own making that challenge and transcend locality. Through reading ethnographies of cultures in the region, we also will examine anthropologies and knowledge being produced outside of the Western academy in Southeast Asia, problematize area studies and the Western construction of a geopolitical region of nation-states called Southeast Asia, and examine the limits of such a designation, as well as benefits as countries in the region that engage in ASEAN contend with globalization. Prerequisite: Sophomore Standing and Above.

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ANTH B254 Anthropology and Social Science Research Methods

Not offered 2024-25

This course is designed for students interested in learning ethnographic and qualitative social science methods, and how to analyze qualitative results. Through hands on fieldwork, students will learn and practice ethnographic field methods, for example, observation, participant observation, interviewing, use of visual media and drawing, life stories, generating and analyzing data, and ways to productively transform qualitative data into contextual information. Ethics in ethnographic research will be a central theme, as will envisioning and designing projects that protect human subjects. The purpose of this course is to provide anthropology majors and students in social sciences, humanities, as well as STEM majors with interests in multi-method research, an opportunity to learn methods in advance of their thesis proposal and research, Hanna Holborn Gray summer research, and other social science independent research opportunities during their undergraduate experience, and post-graduation.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies.

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ANTH B291 Archaeology of Human-Environment Interaction

Not offered 2024-25

For the entirety of our history, humans have been interacting with, responding to, and shaping our environment. In this course, we will discuss how archaeologists study and think about the ways in which people across the globe have engaged with their environments. We will begin with an overview of how archaeologists and anthropologists have theorized about human-environmental interactions. The course will then focus on three methodological frameworks used by archaeologists to study these interactions: geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology, and paleoethnobotany. Students will have the opportunity to study how archaeologists employ these methods together to better understand the relationships between people and the environments in which they live.

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ANTH B293 Extractive Violence and Environmental Justice

Not offered 2024-25

This course will introduce students to the study of environmental justice and examine questions of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and inequality within the political ecology of extractive capitalism. Through ethnographic accounts, documentary film, graphic novels, photography and other multimedia, we will examine case studies of environmental justice, conflicts over resources, and the impacts of extractive industries on indigenous and other frontline communities across the Global South and North. How does ecological toxicity manifest as a form of racialized violence deployed across post-colonial geographies? Why do hydrocarbons produce "modern democracy" in some places and "petro-despotism" in others? How do we make sense of our position in a global political ecology of resource extraction? This course will unfold in three parts: the first will situate the problem of environmental justice within the broader context of humans' impacts on global ecologies; the second will examine the historical context of extractive capitalism; and the third will examine the problem of environmental justice as a legacy of postcolonialism. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and up; Anth 102 recommended/suggested.

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ANTH B352 Humans and Non-Humans

Not offered 2024-25

Anthropology is the study of humans, but the idea of the "human" always implies the category of the "non-human." Humanity is defined in its relation to "non-humans": ranging from tools and technology, to domesticated (and undomesticated) animals, to agricultural crops, our local ecologies, and the global environment. What does it mean to be human? What is the agency of non-humans in human worlds? Do forests think? Do dogs dream? What is the agency of a mountain? What are the rights of a river? What is the cultural significance of DNA? This course will trace Anthropological debates over the "human" and "non-human" in contexts ranging from Amerindian cosmology, to political ecology, and science and technology studies.

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ANTH B354 Political Economy, Gender, Ethnicity and Transformation in Vietnam

Spring 2025

Today, Vietnam is in the midst of dramatic social, economic and political changes brought about through a shift from a central economy to a market/capitalist economy since the late 1980s. These changes have resulted in urbanization, a rise in consumption, changes in land use, movement of people, environmental consequences of economic development, and shifts in social and economic relationships and cultural practices as the country has moved from low income to middle income status. This course examines culture and society in Vietnam focusing largely on contemporary Vietnam, but with a view to continuities and historical precedent in past centuries. In this course, we will draw on anthropological studies of Vietnam, as well as literature and historical studies. Relationships between the individual, family, gender, ethnicity, community, land, and state will pervade the topics addressed in the course, as will the importance of political economy, nation, and globalization. In addition to class seminar discussions, students will view documentary and fictional films about Vietnamese culture. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or higher or first years with ANTH 102.

Writing Attentive

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; International Studies; International Studies.

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ANTH B355 Archaeology of Landscapes

Not offered 2024-25

Traditional archaeology has focused on the "archaeological site" in our attempts to understand past human practices. However, people in the past as with today did not live their lives within the small confines of an archaeological site but rather in the broader landscape surrounding them. In this seminar, students will gain an understanding of different theoretical and methodological approaches to studying the landscape. Using case studies from around the world, we will explore how archaeologists study the ways past people interacted with, modified, and experienced the landscapes in which they dwelt. In doing so, students will gain an appreciation for how the study of landscapes can improve our understanding of peoples lived experiences.

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies.

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ANTH B364 Anthropology of Global Public Health

Spring 2025

This course will use an anthropological lens to explore the field of contemporary global public health. Through readings and ethnographic case studies in cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, applied and critical anthropology, and related social sciences, the class will examine the participants and institutions that make up the production of global health, as well as the knowledge, and value production that have shaped agendas, policies and practices in global health, both historically and in the contemporary. The course will also explore anthropology's relationship to and perspectives on the history of global health. We will examine how local communities, local knowledge and political forces intersect with, shape, and are shaped by global initiatives to impact diseases, treatments, and health care delivery. As well, what the effects are on individuals, families and children, communities, urban and rural areas, and nations. Among other topics, the course will explore health disparities, epidemics/pandemics, global mental health, climate change and infectious diseases, chronic illness, violence, and diseases such as polio, HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, Tuberculosis, etc. Prerequisite(s): ANTH B102/H103 recommended; sophomore standing or higher

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Environmental Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Health Studies.

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BIOL B230 Ecological Exiles and Sustainability

Not offered 2024-25

The fossil record writes a natural history of forced past migrations of organisms due to physiological intolerances of shifting climatic conditions. These paleo stories of ecological exiles provide an informative backdrop for our own species as we grapple with the potential of becoming ecological exiles ourselves within our own lifetimes based on projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For instance, the 2018 World Bank Report projects that climate change could force over 140 million people to migrate by 2050. Actions in support of sustainability initiatives are imperative to the health and well being of our species as we grapple with the status quo and the challenge of environmental injustices. This workshop-based course will begin with the concept of ecological exiles then consider how local initiatives on campus and beyond can help us to work towards global goals for sustainable development. For students enrolled in the Russophone Diaspora 360 cluster, the concept of ecological exiles will be enriched by considering the literature and lived experiences of Russophone émigrés.

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BIOL B262 Urban Ecosystems

Not offered 2024-25

Cities can be considered ecosystems whose functions are highly influenced by human activity. This course will address many of the living and non-living components of urban ecosystems, as well as their unique processes. Using an approach focused on case studies, the course will explore the ecological and environmental problems that arise from urbanization, and also examine solutions that have been attempted. Prerequisite: BIOL B110 or B111 or ENVS B101.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities.

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BIOL B323 Coastal and Marine Ecology

Not offered 2024-25

An interdisciplinary course exploring the ecological, biogeochemical, and physical aspects of coastal and marine ecosystems. We will compare intertidal habitats in both temperate and tropical environments, with a specific emphasis on global change impacts on coastal systems (e.g. sea level rise, warming, and species shifts). Lecture three hours, laboratory three hours per week. In 2020 the course will have a mandatory field trip to a tropical marine field station and an overnight field trip to a temperate field station in the mid-Atlantic. Prerequisite: BIOL B220 or BIOL B225.

Writing Attentive

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies.

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CITY B190 The Form of the City: Urban Form from Antiquity to the Present

Spring 2025

This course studies the city as a three-dimensional artifact. A variety of factors, geography, economic and population structure, politics, planning, and aesthetics are considered as determinants of urban form.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; History of Art.

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CITY B201 Introduction to GIS for Social and Environmental Analysis

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

This course is designed to introduce the foundations of GIS with emphasis on applications for social and environmental analysis. It deals with basic principles of GIS and its use in spatial analysis and information management. Ultimately, students will design and carry out research projects on topics of their own choosing. Prerequisite: At least sophomore standing and Quantitative Readiness are required (i.e.the quantitative readiness assessment or Quan B001).

Quantitative Readiness Required (QR)

Counts Toward: Classical & Near Eastern Arch; Data Science; Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies.

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CITY B345 Advanced Topics in Environment and Society

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Topics vary.

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CITY B377 Topics in Modern Architecture

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Multiplicity & Singularity in later 19th C. Archit

Fall 2024

This is a topics course on modern architecture. Topics vary.

Current topic description: This will be a closely focused seminar, temporally and geographically, that centers on three common, moderate-scale architectural venues, urban houses, suburban houses, and urban places of business -- places that were pervasive and numerically dominant elements of the American built landscape as it was transformed between the 1870s and the 1890s.

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; History of Art.

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EALC B353 The Environment on China's Frontiers

Not offered 2024-25

This seminar explores environmental issues on China's frontiers from a historical perspective. It focuses on the particular relationship between the environment and the frontier, examining how these two variables have interacted. The course will deal with the issues such as the relationship between the environment and human ethnic and cultural traditions, social movements, economic growth, political and legal institutions and practices, and changing perceptions. The frontier regions under discussion include Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and the southwestern ethnic areas, which are all important in defining what China is and who the Chinese are.

Counts Toward: East Asian Languages & Culture; Environmental Studies; International Studies.

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ENGL B204 Native Land, American Literatures, 1607-1899

Not offered 2024-25

This course will explore Anglophone narratives by white and Indigenous writers, between the arrival of the British in Jamestown and the Philippine-American War. We will examine narratives of conquest that understand colonial and US expansion across Indigenous lands as "manifest destiny," and narratives of resistance that understand the same history as imperial conquest and genocide. It took a lot of storytelling, a lot of literary labor, to invent a destiny and to make it manifest on landscapes, peoples and nations. This class asks how certain ingredients of the master-narrative of colonial expansion and the American "wild west" - bloodthirsty, sexually dangerous tribal people, violent white outlaws, hard-working normative white families, empty landscapes, easy money - came to be essential to the American myth. And how were those stories resisted and rewritten even as they were being formed? Ultimately, we will interrogate the so-called "frontier," exposing it as a vastly diverse network of Native-, African- Asian- and Euro-American peoples whose landscapes were already inhabited, already historied, already multinational. Materials examined may include early Indigenous narratives and anonymous writings by white and Indigenous people, and texts and narratives by John Smith, William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, Tituba (Carib), Samson Occom (Mohegan), William Appess (Pequot), Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fennimore Cooper, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), Mary Jemison (Seneca), Black Hawk (Sauk), John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Paiute), Wovoka (Paiute), Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain.

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ENGL B293 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Medieval Ecologies

Not offered 2024-25

This course explores relationships between natural, non-human, and human agents in the Middle Ages. Reading natural philosophy, vernacular literature, and theological treatises, we examine how the Middle Ages understood supposedly "modern" environmental concepts like climate change, sustainability, animal rights, and protected land.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies.

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ENGL B372 Black Ecofeminism(s): Critical Approaches

Spring 2025

How have Black feminist authors and traditions theorized or represented the ecological world and their relationship to it? How does thinking intersectionally about gender(ing) and racialization expand or challenge conventional notions of "nature," conservation, or environmental justice? In what ways does centering racial blackness critically reframe a host of practical and philosophical questions historically brought together under the sign "ecofeminism?" Combining history and theory, the humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary course will use the work of Black feminist writers (broadly defined) across a range of genres to approach and to trouble the major paradigms and problems of contemporary Euro-American ecofeminist thought. The course uses fiction and poetry by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen as a gateway to a range of critical work by Jennifer Morgan, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Mies, and Val Plumwood as it attempts to define and deconstruct what Chelsea Frazier calls "Black Feminist Ecological Thought."

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.

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GEOL B104 The Science of Climate Change

Spring 2025

A survey of the science behind climate change. Students will analyze climate data, read primary scientific literature, examine the drivers of climate change, and investigate the fundamental Earth processes that are affected. We will also examine deep-time climate change and the geologic proxies that Earth scientists use to understand climate change on many different time scales. This course is appropriate for students with little to no scientific background but is geared toward students who are considering a science major. Two 90-minute lectures per week.

Quantitative Methods (QM)

Quantitative Readiness Required (QR)

Scientific Investigation (SI)

Counts Toward: Data Science; Environmental Studies.

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GEOL B108 Earth's Oceans: Past, Present, and Future

Spring 2025

This course is designed to expose students to the fundamentals of oceanography with an emphasis on how Earth's oceans are tied to life and climate and how we study these links in the present and in the fossil record. We will spend much time understanding how the modern ocean works and how biogeochemical cycles interact with it. A major focus will be how we can use the ocean's past and present to make predictions about its future. This is a flipped course in which students study pre-recorded presentations outside of class. Class time is devoted to labs, demonstrations, and other activities.

Scientific Investigation (SI)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies.

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GEOL B203 Biosphere Through Time

Fall 2024

We will explore how the Earth-life system has evolved through time by studying the interactions between life, climate, and tectonic processes. During the lab component of the course, we will study important fossil groups to better understand their paleoecology and roles in the Earth-life system. Prerequisite: GEOL B101, GEOL B108, or GEOL B209.

Scientific Investigation (SI)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies.

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GEOL B206 Energy Resources and Sustainability

Fall 2024

An examination of issues concerning the supply of energy required by humanity. This includes an investigation of the geological framework that determines resource availability, aspects of energy production and resource development and the science of global climate change. Two 90-minute lectures a week. Suggested preparation: one year of college science.

Scientific Investigation (SI)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies.

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GEOL B209 Natural Hazards

Spring 2025

A quantitative approach to understanding Earth processes that impact human societies. We will examine earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, storms, and floods and explore the risks that they pose to communities. Course emphases include the fundamental physical principles and processes that govern natural hazards, approaches to mitigating the effects of natural disasters and responding in their aftermath, and examples of natural disasters from the recent and historical past. Lecture three hours a week.

Quantitative Methods (QM)

Quantitative Readiness Required (QR)

Scientific Investigation (SI)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities.

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GEOL B302 Low-Temperature Geochemistry

Spring 2025

Stable isotope geochemistry is one of the most important subfields of the Earth sciences for understanding environmental and climatic change. In this course, we will explore stable isotopic fundamentals and applications including important case studies from the recent and deep time dealing with important biotic events in the fossil record and major climate changes. Prerequisites: GEOL B101 or GEOL B108, and at least one semester of chemistry or physics, or permission of instructor.

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies.

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HART B220 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Landscapes, Art, & Racial Ecologies

Spring 2025

This course is writing intensive. This course uses art, visual, and material culture to trace the plantation's centrality to colonial and post-colonial environments in the Atlantic World from the eighteenth century to the present, as a site of environmental destruction as well as parallel ecologies engendered by African-descended peoples' aesthetic and botanical contestation. Objects to be considered include landscape painting, plantation cartography, scientific imagery, environmental art, and ecologically motivated science fiction. This course was formerly numbered HART B111; students who previously completed HART B111 may not repeat this course. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies.

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HIST B203 The High Middle Ages

Not offered 2024-25

We're becoming used to the idea of environmental crisis. Drought, floods, storms, and extinctions constantly remind us that humans can be terrifyingly effective at shaping the world in which we live. But the interplay between human agents and the rest of the world is as old as humanity. This course explores how people in the European Middle Ages - mostly the peasants left out of the history books - lived with and made decisions about limited natural resources, looming overexploitation, customary common rights, and shared responsibilities, all within the narrow margins which characterized their immediate and taxing relationship with their landscapes. The period is alien in many ways: it was an age of faith, oaths, and lordship. Horsepower was measured in literal horses (or in human muscle). But the decisions its people made, and the assumptions they held, have shaped our own world in ways we don't always see. How did people in another age work within the constraints set by their environments? How did they change those environments to suit their desires? And whose desires were being pursued? Who was left out? Through attention to cultivation, climates, plague, and human conceptions of the natural world, we'll consider these questions, and seek to gain glimpses of the human-to-human and human-to-non-human relationships that dominated the medieval experience.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies.

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INST B201 Themes in International Studies

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

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INST B220 Political Ecology and Environmental Justice

Spring 2025

This course is an introduction to the fields of Political Ecology and Environmental Justice. Through ethnographic accounts, documentary film, graphic novels, photography and other multimedia, students will be introduced to ethnographic case studies of environmental justice struggles, conflicts over resources, and the impacts of extractive industries on indigenous and other frontline communities across the Global South and North. How, we will ask, do environmental problems, such as climate change, pollution and toxicity, biodiversity loss and extinctions, and struggles over resource extraction intersect with questions of identity and inequality, such as race, ethnicity, nation, indigeneity, and gender? Students will make use of the theoretical and methodological tools offered by environmental justice and political ecology to critically examine: processes of globalization, development, and the racialized postcolonial geographies of resource extraction; the problem of environmental racism, and social movements for indigenous sovereignty and climate justice; and science and technology studies inquiries into the relations between humans and non-humans. Together, we will trace the historical roots, colonial logics, and contemporary effects of extractive capitalism and learn from the legacies of movements social and environmental justice in order to interrogate our own positionality within the global political ecology of resource extraction and consumption. Prerequisite: Intro to International Studies recommended as preparation

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Anthropology; Environmental Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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PHIL B240 Environmental Ethics

Not offered 2024-25

This course surveys rights- and justice-based justifications for ethical positions on the environment. It examines approaches such as stewardship, intrinsic value, land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, Asian and aboriginal. It explores issues such as obligations to future generations, to nonhumans and to the biosphere.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies; Political Science.

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POLS B256 Global Politics of Climate Change

Not offered 2024-25

This course will introduce students to important political issues raised by climate change locally, nationally, and internationally, paying particular attention to the global implications of actions at the national and subnational levels. It will focus not only on specific problems, but also on solutions; students will learn about some of the technological and policy innovations that are being developed worldwide in response to the challenges of climate change. Only open to students in 360 program.

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POLS B310 Comparative Public Policy

Not offered 2024-25

A comparison of policy processes and outcomes across space and time. Focusing on particular issues such as health care, domestic security, water and land use, we identify institutional, historical, and cultural factors that shape policies. We also examine the growing importance of international-level policy making and the interplay between international and domestic pressures on policy makers. Writing attentive. Prerequisite: One course in Political Science or public policy.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies; Health Studies.

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POLS B326 Comparative Environmental Politics in East and Southeast Asia

Not offered 2024-25

East Asia (referring to both Northeast and Southeast Asia) is often discussed as one unit vis-à-vis other economic blocs yet this region is a home to the largest population in the world with various divergent cultures, colonial histories, religions, political system and state-society relations, as well as the level of economic development. With increasing focus on 3Es- Economic growth, Environment protection, and Energy security- as shared priorities at the regional level, such diversities serve not only as opportunities but challenges for East Asian states to cope with environmental issues. Geographic proximity makes countries in the region environmentally interdependent, and heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels make energy security as a matter of survival. Increasing public outcry over pollution and resultant health problems has also challenged political legitimacy and sustainable economic development. his course explores contemporary environmental issues in East Asia from comparative political economy perspective and sheds light on how environmental problems - and solutions - are often shaped by political context and interweaved into varying actors' perceived interest. Main questions in the course include: What kind of environmental problems East Asia face and how diverse historical, political and economic conditions of each country shape the context in which countries deal with the problem either individually or collectively? What are the roles of various social, political and market actors in environmental politics? What sorts of approaches seem most likely to solve local, national and regional environmental issues such as air pollution, natural resource depletion, and climate change? What are the impacts of globalization and technological innovation in dealing with environmental issues? Prerequisite: Junior standing or higher, previous courses in social science, humanities, area studies or relevant experiences are required. This course meets writing intensive requirement.

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RUSS B220 Chornobyl

Not offered 2024-25

This course introduces students to the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, its consequences, and its representations across a range of cultures and media through a comparative lens and as a global phenomenon. Culture meets ecology, science, history, and politics. Students will contribute to a digital exhibition and physical installation. Taught in translation. No knowledge of Russian required.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; Environmental Studies; Health Studies; International Studies.

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RUSS B232 Coal, Oil, Nuclear: Narrative Afterlives

Not offered 2024-25

Coal. Oil. Nuclear energy. These items give shape to our everyday lives in countless ways. They impact our health, our politics, and our very survival on earth.. Nevertheless, because these resources permeate nearly every aspect of our existence, the human mind can struggle to comprehend them in their totality. In this course, we'll explore texts that engage with our environment to help us bring humans' relationship to these materials into focus. Scientific, historical, and economic studies tend to focus on their scale and widespread impact. Reading stories, watching

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; Environmental Studies; International Studies.

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RUSS B234 Ecological Displacement in Russophone Literature

Not offered 2024-25

Our era of immense environmental upheaval is striking in its urgency and scale, but it is, of course, far from unprecedented. In this class, we'll consider the effects of ecological displacement, both real and imagined as portrayed in Russophone literature; its ties to solastalgia, nostalgia, and the condition of exile; art as a form of conservation; and historical and environmental issues in the region.

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SPAN B239 Escribir la naturaleza: Animales y plantas en la literatura latinoamericana

Not offered 2024-25

What role does literature play in this age of ecological crisis and natural disasters? How has literature often mediated the relationships between the human and the non-human? How does nature writings in Latin America reflect, problematize and criticize the intense "geological fault" of anthropocentrism? From the earliest days of the exploration and conquest of the American continent, the texts of the Europeans set a repertoire of obsessions in which looking at or imagining nature became a constant. Plants and animals, since then, became a recurring topic. Described first as wonders or horrors, with time they will be scientifically and politically loaded. By the 20th century, the fictionalization of plants and animals has been one of the central concerns of Latin American literature, opening, thus, a fertile ground for textual explorations from the perspective of ecocriticism. This course will analyze the place of plants and animals in Latin American literature: how they reveal the relationships between the human and the environment (the landscape and other non-human life forms). We will explore, then, the place of the zoological and botanical at the heart of some of the literary proposals of many different authors who invite us to think about the multiple tensions between human and non-human, nature and culture, ecology and aesthetics, science and literature.This course will be taught in Spanish.

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