240519 SE Social Lives of Ecology (P4) (2023S)

This course focuses on the entanglements of environment, society and politics in late 20th century and early 21st century. Borrowing from environmental anthropology, political ecology, multispecies studies and ethnographies of energy transitions, the course interrogates distinctive forms of political and economic transformations that occur through environmental relations.

The course starts from political ecology foundations which speak of uneven distribution of gains and losses that environmental transformation brings, including the social displacement and economic dis/repossession. Further on, it focuses on how popular environmental sentiments embed themselves in different cultural and material conditions (the so called “environmentalism of the poor”, "environmentalism of the rich” and “environmentalism of the malcontent"). Further on, it describes how ecology has been the basis of new social identities since the 1960s, and what parallels and discontinuities we find with new “ecopopulist” social movements in 2000s. Finally, the course examines how planetary climate change and transition to ‘clean’ energy are materially distributed, symbolically conceptualised, demographically and socially embedded, and politically charged in different parts of the world. Finally, the course examines the concept of "moral ecology” and its usefulness how explaining hegemony and resistance are shaped through environmental policies, as well as the emergence of multispecies ethnography and “more than human” turn in recent years.

By the end of the course, the students should be able to:

1) Understand why political ecology can never be separated from historical and socioeconomic context
2) Theorise new entwinements of protest and ecology, capital, environment and the state
3) Understand sociopolitical implications of various environmentalist projects
4) Conceptualise their own proposals for further study and research in these matters.

Each session will contain 1-2 key readings to be discussed. In some of the sessions, students will present on particular case studies they read about in one article of their choice from the list. In some of the sessions, a topic will be explored further through a documentary film.