SST 503 Sustainability Through the Lens of the Environmental Humanities
This course introduces students to the Environmental Humanities a field which investigates ways of thinking about climate change, sustainability and societal change in the humanities. It brings together perspectives from art history and the arts, literature, film, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, philosophy, history, and media studies. Central to these ways of thinking is how we conceptualize the relationship between nature and cultures and between of humans and the environment. These have been discussed in successive paradigms beginning with Environmental Justice in the 70s, the Anthropocene in the 1990s, to describe a new geological age shaped by modernization and industrialization, followed by Posthumanism and the Pluriverse . These terms have been accompanied by proliferating debates and mediations, through which issues of sustainability in a great range of domains are discussed, implemented, or negated.. An important emphasis is on the significance of representation and discourse to help students understand their role in twenty-first century societies, together with the strategic part played by communication technologies and media in the perception of sustainability questions in the global digital age and AI. A second emphasis is on the conjunction between those subfields in the humanities concerned with a critical assessment of the impact of environmentalist thought on societal sustainability, as they intertwine with the environmental crises of our postcolonial world and demonstrate the impact of globalization on environmental situations. Crucially, it considers the modes through which discursive iterations relating to the physical transformation of the world, in turn come to inform and affect this very transformation.
Offered
Fall