DSOC 7500

Food, Ecology, and Agrarian Change

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

This seminar is concerned with the sociology of agri-food systems and their ecological relations. Modernization narratives, in casting agriculture as an original baseline of human development, have (inadvertently or not) consigned agriculture, and food, to the margins of social thought and analysis. The current crisis of the global food economy has focused attention and public discourse on agriculture, and its increasingly evident ecological implications. Pressing ecological questions, in addition to the latest food crisis, are forcing a new look at the agri-food system and its social and environmental functions. This seminar is designed to introduce students to analytical approaches and contemporary issues and processes concerning food, ecology and agrarian change.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: graduate students.

• Explain, evaluate, and effectively interpret factual claims, theories and assumptions in the student's discipline(s) (especially in one or more of the college's priority areas of land grant-agricultural sciences, applied social sciences, environmental sciences, and/or life sciences) and more broadly in the sciences and humanities.
• Find, access, critically evaluate, and ethically use information.
• Apply methods of sustainability to the analysis of one or more major challenges facing humans and the Earth's resources.

View Enrollment Information