Introduction to Environmental Humanities

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course introduces students to key concepts and texts in environmental humanities, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, sexuality, capital, nation, and globalization. The course examines the conceptual foundations that support humanistic analyses of environmental issues, climate crisis, and the ethics of justice and care. In turn, this critical analysis can serve as the basis for responding to the urgency of calls for environmental action.

 

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will learn what difference humanistic studies make to understanding environmental issues and climate crisis. The course will prepare students to:


Identify humanistic methods and how they contribute to understanding the world;

Demonstrate critical approaches to reading and representing environments;

Engage ethical questions related to the environment; and

Apply concepts from the course to synthesize the student’s use of humanistic approaches to address urgent environmental questions.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Ashley Dawson
  Info
• 3 points

Critical Approaches in Social and Cultur

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE).

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Alexander Pittman
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 3 points

CRITICAL APPROACHES-DISC

• 0 points

INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISMS

Enrollment for this class is by instructor approval and an application is required. Please fill out the form here: 
https://forms.gle/bPsV7rcf5RWB35PM9

This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) as well as Majors/Minors in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty and guest speakers who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Marisa Solomon
  Info
• 3 points

INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISMS DISCUSSION SECT

N/A

• 0 points

FEMINIST THEORY

Prerequisites: LIMITED TO 20 BY INSTRUC PERM; ATTEND FIRST CLASS

This course provides a theoretical itinerary to the emergence of contemporary queer theory and engagement with some contemporary legacies of the movement. The goal is not to be exhaustive nor to establish a correct history of queer theory but to engage students in the task of understanding and creating intellectual genealogies.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Faculty
  h-index: 37 Info
• 4 points

GENDERED CONTROVERSIES

Love and sex have long been studied as historical constructs influenced by social, political, and economic dimensions. This course aims to expand this discourse by incorporating the often-overlooked lens of technological mediation. Beginning with the premise that romantic love is deeply shaped by the affordances of the technology of the time, a critical awareness of technological mediation in romance –especially of digital technologies, i.e. online dating, social media, or cybersex— allows for a deeper understanding of how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability, or sexuality are technologically-mediated, thereby informing our societal and cultural perceptions of love, dating, and sex. 

 

Sandra Moyano-Ariza is Term Assistant Professor of WGSS and Research Director at BCRW. Her research works at the intersection of pop culture, philosophy, and digital technologies, with interests in the fields of media studies and digital scholarship, contemporary feminist theory, critical race theory, posthumanism, and affect theory.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Sandra Moyano-Ariza
  Info
• 4 points

HIST APPROACHES FEMINIST QUES

Comparative study of gender, race, and sexuality through specific historical, socio-cultural contexts in which these systems of power have operated. With a focus on social contexts of slavery, colonialism, and modern capitalism for the elaboration of sex-gender categories and systems across historical time.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Lisa Duggan
  Info
• 4 points

STUDIES IN U.S. IMPERIALISM

Historical, comparative study of the cultural effects and social experiences of U.S. imperialism, with attention to race, gender and sexuality in practices of domination and struggle.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Neferti Tadiar
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Senior Seminar I (Barnard)

SENIOR SEMINAR I

Student-designed capstone research projects offer practical lessons about how knowledge is produced, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the application of interdisciplinary feminist methodologies.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• W 9 a.m.-10:50 a.m.
• Instructor: Manijeh Moradian
  Info
• Instructor: Janet Jakobsen
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

GENDER, SEXUALITY & POWER IN TRANSNATION

GEND,SEX&POWER TRANSNATL

This course considers formations of gender, sexuality, and power as they circulate transnationally, as well as transnational feminist and queer movements that have emerged to address contemporary gendered and sexual inequalities. Topics include political economy, global care chains, sexuality, sex work and trafficking, feminist and queer politics, and human rights. If it is a small world after all, how do forces of globalization shape and redefine the relationship between gender, sexuality, and powerful institutions like the state? And, if power swirls everywhere, how are transnational power dynamics reinscribed in gendered bodies? How is the body represented in discussions of nationalism and in the political economy of globalization? These questions will frame this course by highlighting how gender, sexuality, and power coalesce to impact the lives of individuals in various spaces including workplaces, the academy, the home, religious institutions, the government, and civil society, and human rights organizations. This course will enable us to think transnationally, historically, and dynamically, using gender and sexuality as lenses through which to critique relations of power and the ways that power informs our everyday lives and subjectivities.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Manijeh Moradian
  Info
• 4 points

BLACK GEOGRAPHIES

Far from obvious renderings of place, maps are spatial arguments about who belongs where and how living should be defined. This course approaches place as something that is contested daily in the U.S. through the struggle of who gets to lay claim to a way of life. From the landscapes of dispossession to the alternative ways marginalized people work with and against traditional geographies, this course centers Black place-making practices as political struggle. This class will look at how power and domination become a landed project. We will critically examine how ideas about “nature” are bound up with notions of race, and the way “race” naturalizes the proper place for humans and non-human others. We will interrogate settler colonialism’s relationships to mapping who is and isn’t human, the transatlantic slave trade as a project of terraforming environments for capital, and land use as a science for determining who “owns” the earth. Centered on Black feminist, queer and trans thinkers, we will encounter space not as a something given by maps, but as a struggle over definitions of the human, geography, sovereignty, and alternative worlds. To this end, we will read from a variety of disciplines, such as Critical Black Studies, Feminist and Intersectional Science Studies, Black Geographies and Ecologies, Urban Studies and Afrofuturist literature. (Note: this class will count as an elective for the CCIS minors/concentrations in F/ISTS, ICORE/MORE, and Environmental Humanities.)

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Marisa Solomon
  Info
• 4 points

Planetary Questions

PLANETARY QUESTIONS

This advanced seminar examines important approaches, issues, perspectives, and themes related to planetary concerns of environmental crisis, climate change, life sustainability, and multi-species flourishing, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives. Topics for discussion and study include the global pandemic,  histories of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism,

Prereqs: BOTH 1 WMST Intro course PLUS any WGSS 'Foundation' course, OR instructor permission.

• W 11:10 a.m.-1 p.m.
• Instructor: Neferti Tadiar
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

EMBODIMENT AND BODILY DIFFERENCE

EMBODIMENT & BODILY DIFFE

At once material and symbolic, our bodies exist at the intersection of multiple competing discourses, including the juridical, the techno-scientific, and the biopolitical. In this course, we will draw upon a variety of critical interdisciplinary literatures—including feminist and queer studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies—to consider some of the ways in which the body is constituted by such discourses, and itself serves as the substratum for social relations. Among the key questions we will consider are the following: What is natural about the body? How are distinctions made between presumptively normal and pathological bodies, and between psychic and somatic experiences?  How do historical and political-economic forces shape the perception and meaning of bodily difference? And most crucially: how do bodies that are multiply constituted by competing logics of gender, race, nation, and ability offer up resistance to these and other categorizations?

• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Rebecca Jordan-Young
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points