GEOG 157, Decolonizing Nature: Race, Empire and the Environment

Catalog Description: This course seeks to trace the rise of the anthropogenic epoch as a political epistemology, changing material milieu, and amorphous and contested political signifier. The notion of the Anthropocene challenges the very boundaries of nature and culture that have plagued and defined modernity. Natural forces and inanimate objects from storms and bodies, ocean flows and river currents, soil layers and chemical reactions are more and more commonly understood as always already natural/cultural. What are the differential ways that the universal categories of the human at the heart of the concept of the Anthropocene mask the differential responsibility and liability for these epochal changes?

Units: 4.0

Prerequisites: None

Formats: 

Fall and/or Spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week

Grading Basis: Letter

Final Exam Status: Final exam required


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