233042 SE Inequality and Sustainability (2022W)

Efforts to shift human activities onto a sustainable trajectory are profoundly challenged by global inequalities of income, wealth, and power. Unsustainable practices, and the local and global challenge they cause, impose disproportionately heavy burdens on the least advantaged. Any serious effort to achieve sustainability must address inequality. In this course we will examine aspects of the entanglement of global inequalities with efforts to achieve sustainability.

A distinguishing feature of the course is its critical stance toward the material we will study, which means that we will not only understand course readings on their own terms but will also compare and evaluate contrasting perspectives, independently evaluate claims with other evidence and, at times, try to stand apart from the entire discussion and ask, for example, about the limitations of science and technology as pathways to a sustainable future.

Course readings balance analytic explanation with normative evaluation, historical trends with contemporary concerns, global forces with local circumstances, structural conditions with human experiences, quantitative measures with qualitative understanding, continuities with disruptions, scholarly literature with writings intended for the educated general public. By reading and discussing such diverse literature we will develop an integrative understanding of the nature and dimensions of the challenge of attaining sustainability in the current climate of global inequality, built upon a foundation of empirical evidence and theoretical explanation, and directed toward forming strategies for accomplishing transitions toward sustainability.