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. We will also focus on
how the generalized contemporary environmental crisis plays out on the specific terrain of New
York City.
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;
• Apply concepts from the course to synthesize the student’s use of humanistic approaches
to address urgent environmental questions;
• Develop a strong understanding of how generalized elements of the environmental crisis
play out in and are resisted in New York City.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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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.
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Instructor:
Alexander Pittman
CULPA: 10
Info
- 3 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.
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Instructor:
Marisa Solomon
Info - 3 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.
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Instructor:
Casidy Campbell
Info - 4 points
ALGORITHMIC LOVE: SEX, TECHNOLOGY, POWER
In academic discourse, romance and sex are often discussed as historical constructs shaped by the social, economic, and political contexts of their time, marking a powerful association between the romantic discourse and capitalism. This course builds on this understanding while supplementing it with the critical but often-overlooked role of technological mediation. Starting from the premise that romantic love is profoundly influenced by the affordances of the technology of its time, a critical awareness of technological mediation in romance—especially of digital technologies, i.e., online dating, social media, or cybersex– will afford us an understanding of how social categories such as gender, race, class, ability, or sexuality are redefined by technologies and in turn govern popular cultural perceptions of dating and sex.
Whereas technology is usually framed as prosthetic or derivative of the human, this course challenges this view approaching technological developments as ‘co-produced’ by humans and technology, forcing us to grapple with both the inherently discriminatory power of socio-technical systems and the unimaginable capacities of these digital devices (Benjamin 2020). The course readings span sociology, media studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, or disability studies, equipping students with a critical framework to understand and analyze power structures in love (and beyond) in the contemporary conditions of algorithmic governance.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Instructor:
Janet Jakobsen
CULPA: 6
Wikipedia
Info
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Instructor:
Manijeh Moradian
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.
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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.
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Instructor:
Marisa Solomon
Info - 4 points
ADVANCED TOPICS
AFRICA-ASIA-AMERICA
This course explores transcontinental connections across Africa, Asia, and the Americas as
forged in the practices and movements of peoples, in the context of global colonial and
postcolonial orders. We will consider the intersections, crossings, and collaborations of
different communities of the global South across these continents in the course of their social,
cultural, and political struggles to shape and transform the worlds they live in. We will ask, how
might different narratives of these global South connections contribute to our imagination and
practice of global resistance and transformation? Topics include: colonialism, capitalism,
imperialism, Third Worldism, feminism.
- W 11:10 a.m.-1 p.m.
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Instructor:
Neferti Tadiar
CULPA: 10
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points