Environmental Sociology - Nature, Power, and Justice
Environmental Sociology is one of the newest additions to the sociological canon, emerging out of the environmental movement of the 1970s. Since that time, it has opened the door to a wide array of sub-disciplines, academic journals, conferences, as well as intellectual and popular movements that have redefined social analysis. As climate change, resource crises, and epidemics are ravaging the planet with blistering speed, there could not be a more timely moment to immerse yourself in this field of study.
As it is currently designed, this course is intended for advanced undergraduate students that will have had some exposure to sociological theory. This is important, because much of what environmental sociology has to offer are perspectives that counter some of the assumptions of classical sociological thought, and troubling common-sense notion of society’s relation to Nature.
The course begins with basic environmental sociological precepts, complicating students’ ideas about human exemptionalism and doxic economic and philosophical paradigms, while providing the historical backdrop to the formation of the sub-discipline. In the second part of the course, we cover macrotheoretical frameworks, weaving historical and contemporary case studies into our readings that will as students to begin applying their theoretical knowledge. In this section, students will be asked to reinterpret the role of the state and social power compared to orthodox sociological frameworks. In the final part of the course, we focus on social movements and environmental justice, covering the emergence of contemporary discourse out of the civil rights movement. In so doing, we will analyze the characteristics of the environmental justice movement as distinguished from “bourgeois environmentalism” and NIMBYism. Throughout the course, students will work on an independent research based project towards analyzing an environmental issue of their choice. They will also develop an action plan for how to combat the structural inequality their project identifies.