Universität Wien

240521 SE Toxic Worlds: Chemical Entanglements and Afterlives in the Anthropocene (P4) (2022S)

5.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 24 - Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie
Continuous assessment of course work

Participation at first session is obligatory!

The lecturer can invite students to a grade-relevant discussion about partial achievements. Partial achievements that are obtained by fraud or plagiarized result in the non-evaluation of the course (entry 'X' in certificate). The plagiarism software 'Turnitin' will be used for courses with continuous assessment.
Moodle

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 20 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

Update 14.03.2022: Due to illness, the session on March 14th is cancelled.

If possible, the course is to be conducted in presence. Due to the respective applicable distance regulations and other measures, adjustments may be made.

  • Tuesday 01.03. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 08.03. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 15.03. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 22.03. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 29.03. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 05.04. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 26.04. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 03.05. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 10.05. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 17.05. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 24.05. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 31.05. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 14.06. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 21.06. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock
  • Tuesday 28.06. 16:45 - 18:15 Hörsaal C, NIG 4. Stock

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

This course explores questions of technologically-induced ecological ruination and health related issues by engaging critically with the many toxic materials, imaginaries, and futurities. In so doing, the course aims to examining in which multiple ways many human and more-than-human beings have experienced toxicity and health deteriorated existences in the Anthropocene. The anthropological texts taken into account during the course analyse various perspectives on alternative worlds that could follow from environmental pollution, anthropogenic climate change, radiological contamination, species extinction, the proposed Anthropocene epoch, as well as the dreary futures they call us to envisage. In addition, the course shows how disciplines such as Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Science & Technology can widen our repertoire of modalities for engaging with Anthropocene today and tomorrow as well as how we can conceive of other term to define and frame present and future intertwinements among the environment, humans and more-than-human beings.
The goal of this course is to expand students’ capacities to reckon with futures near and deep during a historic moment of ecological turmoil, and to support a sustained reflection on the art of living wisely on a damaged planet. Therefore, we take toxicity in all its contradictions as both an object and an analytic that helps us ask new questions and gain new perspectives on the materialities of social difference, the politics of evidence, the nature of health, and the nature of nature. We will trace how toxicity connects us to histories, to processes, to others positioned otherwise and elsewhere and both relies on and unsettles familiar geographies of colonialism and state sovereignty. In this regard, students will engage with various questions and issues. Therefore, they will be able to: (1) critically evaluate debates about environmental justice in various world settings ad contexts; (2) understand key features and problems of toxicity in both the Global South and North; (3) relate health environmental toxicity and pollution with health issues and socio-economic and political vulnerability; comprehend the multiple ways that the production of scientific/biomedical expertise entails the management of race, gender, disability, class and other categories of social difference and how such expertise are driven by wider socio-political and economic interests; and finally to look at the politics of scientific evidence and the way authoritative knowledge is tied to various forms of discursive practices.

Assessment and permitted materials

Regular participation in class debates/discussion, oral presentation of the results of research on an agreed topic and drafting of a seminar paper of about 3.000 words constitute the course requirements. Course classes can be based on either active and regular participation only or on active and regular participation with a final examination/assignment. The seminar is based on class discussions and analysis of reading materials or other sources, written or oral presentations. Students should also note that no late assignments will be accepted. They are therefore asked to complete all written works on time and make sure to see the lecturer in his office hours with any questions or issues that may arise during seminar classes.

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

For the grade of this seminar students should try to attend the lessons, take actively part in them and prepare a presentation of about 15 min. plus 10 min. of questions and discussions. Furthermore, the examination modality entails a written assignment of 3000 words. Therefore, 80 % attendance is required. If one session is missed an additional assignment must be completed. The grade is therefore defined as follows: seminar paper 40%, presentation 40%, and contribution to discussion in class 20%.

Examination topics

The seminar is based on presentations, engagements in discussions and works in small groups. Additionally, students will work out individual seminar papers on topics that are related to their presentation or are of their personal interest.

Reading list

Agard-Jones, Vanessa. 2013. “Bodies in the System.” Small Axe 17, no. 3: 182–92.
Singer, Merrill, ed. A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
Murphy, Michelle. 2017. “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4: 494–503.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35(2).
Ferdinand, Malcom. 2022. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Polity Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities 6.
Hecht, Gabrielle. 2008. Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence. Cultural Anthropology 33(1).
de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. “Uncommoning Nature.” e-flux, no. 65.
Fortun, Kim. 2001. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disasters, New Global Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.v
Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Durham: Duke University Press.
Parreñas, Juno Salazar. 2018. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Boston: Polity Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Masco, Joseph. 2008. Survival is Your Business: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America. Cultural Anthropology 23(2).
Langwick, Stacey Ann. 2018. “A Politics of Habitability: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 3: 415–443.
Lamoreaux, Janelle. 2016. “What if the Environment is a Person? Lineages of Epigenetic Science in a Toxic China.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 2: 188–214.

Association in the course directory

Last modified: Mo 14.03.2022 14:09