STS 4413

Environments, Disasters, Health

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024.

Environments shape who we are. Environment is omnipresent, and sometimes seems timeless, yet what we experience around us is an outcome of centuries of making, reworking, and reconstructing. This course begins with readings that familiarize students with historically informed meanings and descriptions of the environment. By using examples drawn from different parts of the world, it then interrogates how relations between environmental disasters and health are mediated through social categories like class, gender, race, or caste. Broad topics include social justice and the environment, multispecies relations, nature-culture debates, slow violence, and environmental disasters and catastrophes.

When Offered Fall.

Permission Note Priority given to: seniors.

Distribution Category (CA-AS, SCD-AS, SSC-AS)

• Familiarity with key concepts and current debates around the environment and environmental disasters
• Understand the relation between theory/ concepts and practice/empirical examples, and learn how concepts are contextual and how they change over time
• Identify how "scientific", "cultural", "political" ideas and practices are co-constituted
• Read/ experience inter-disciplinary materials and value knowledge from different sources
• Develop tools to think critically and be able to write complex ideas in structured and legible ways
• Be able to identify one's own research topic and learn how to write a thesis statement/ argument

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