Contemporary Southeast Asia: Environmental Politics
Dr. Shae Frydenlund
General Education: Social Science & Human Diversity 鈥� Global Perspective
Course Description:
In this class we will learn about environmental issues and imagine solutions to these problems. This includes learning from the radical visions of SolarPunk and Indigenous climate futurism.
This class will encourage you to think deeply about the relationship between humans from different societies and globally to the non-human world, what we often call 鈥渢he environment.鈥� We will explore how people from different cultures within the US and globally, conceptualize, interact with, and manage their environment differently.
Course materials will explore how human modification of the earth and its non-human inhabitants differs globally, as do the effects of human induced changes on the environment. Topics we will cover include anthropogenic climate change, labor and political economy, population and consumption, institutions, environmental hazards, environmental ethics, environmental racism and justice, sustainability, and conservation.
The first part of the semester will be devoted to learning about analytical perspectives through which the nature-society relationship is often interpreted: both traditional academic and radically creative. These perspectives define issues and problems in distinct ways, and thus also propose distinct types of solutions. We will use carbon dioxide as an initial example as we work through these perspectives. Thus we will learn about anthropogenic climate change and different imagined solutions to climate change and environmental problems.
Then in the second half of the class, we will apply these perspectives to several other objects for exploration, including food, wildlife, water, e-waste, and uranium. Using multiple analytical perspectives to analyze nature-society relationships will give you an opportunity to develop and advance your critical thinking skills, providing you with an expanded toolbox with which to interpret environmental issues.
Through this class, you should find that geography offers an integrated way of understanding environment-society relations that is useful for addressing some of the world鈥檚 most pressing problems and imagining solutions to these problems.
What is SolarPunk and Indigenous Futurism?
Most of what we hear about climate change is apocalyptic. We regularly see images of climate ruin. There is little space for imagining alternatives to the climate apocalypse in this view. But the future doesn鈥檛 have to be apocalyptic. Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and scholars advance a radically different view of the future, in which new worlds are built using knowledge and skills that have enabled indigenous survival through thousands of years.
Complimentary to Indigenous Futurism, SolarPunk is a literary and artistic movement that imagines and works toward a sustainable future that integrates nature and community. The 鈥渟olar鈥� is a nod to renewable energy and technology and the 鈥減unk鈥� refers to post-capitalist, DIY, and decolonial politics. Throughout the semester we will read the book Multispecies Cities: SolarPunk Urban Futures, a collection of short stories by mostly Asian and global South authors (eg. non-European or American people from poorer and formerly colonized countries). The stories imagine a different future and different human-environment relationships, asking the question 鈥淲hat might city ecosystems look like in the future if we strive for multispecies justice in our urban settings?鈥� Together with your group, you will create a utopian city inspired by the short stories you read, learnings from the course, and your own academic research.
Why is this Geography?
A common misconception is that geography is apolitical - simply the study of where places are located. You do need to know where places are located, particularly in relationship to other places, in order to study geography, but geography is more broadly the integrated study of the earth鈥檚 landscapes, peoples, places, and environments and the uneven distribution of resources between and among societies and places. Geographers study the relationship between humans and the earth, between society and space, and ask how places came to be as they are (physically, culturally, politically). The integrated nature of geography bridges the social and biophysical sciences, connecting the dynamics of cultures, societies and
economies with those of physical landscapes and environmental processes, putting understanding of processes within the context of places and regions. Contemporary geography is often thought of as having four subfields: physical geography, human geography, nature-society, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). This class introduces you to nature-society geography.
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