Intersectional Ecologies

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course explores processes of power and expertise and the way they work relationally to shape people’s claims to the environment. It strives to continue environmental anthropology’s movement beyond problematic imaginaries of nature as foundational, beyond a reifying focus on subalterity, beyond unproblematized images of marginalization, and beyond the uncritical use of the savage slot. Furthermore, this project is not concerned with listing people who are the most recognizable. Instead, it promotes critical intersectionality within environmental anthropology, articulating a political stance from which to rethink environments. Intersectional Ecologies takes the field in a new direction. This course builds on scholarship that expands debates about the value of anthropology to the humanistic study of the environment. These themes are guideposts for thinking about the environment in its many dimensions. This course attempts to offer theoretical and regional breadth that pushes at the intellectual and practical boundaries of environmental anthropology.