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Instruction Mode: Hybrid - Online & In Person
This seminar explores the history of capitalism over the long twentieth century - focusing on the cheapening of labor, food, energy and raw materials and the potential reversal of this process in today’s unfolding climate crisis. By re-conceiving capitalism as a world-ecology of power, capital and webs of life, it reframes conventional accounts of planetary crisis that are premised on a Nature-Society dualism. Cheap Nature strategies extend far beyond the commodification of forests, soils and animals to include questions of race and gender and the geocultural boundaries defining whose lives and labors matter – and whose do not. Through this optic of Cheap Nature’s double register—entangled economic and ethico-political projects— and critical readings on social reproduction, agrarian crises, urbanization and climate change, the seminar will reflect upon the epistemic, analytic, and geocultural dualisms that fragment our analyses of late capitalism.