Energy, Environment, and Society
Uses a problem-solving, multi-disciplinary, and multicultural approach that takes energy beyond the complex circuits, grids, and kilojoules to the realm of everyday life, with ordinary people as practitioners and producers of energy knowledge, infrastructures, and technologies. The three main objectives are to immerse students in the historical, cultural, multi-cultural, and entrepreneurial aspects of energy across the world to make them better energy engineers; to introduce them to research and analytical methods; and to deploy these methods and their various skills to solve/design a solution, in groups, to a specific energy problem chosen by the students. Each cohort tackles a different energy problem. Provides instruction on how to be active shapers of the world and to bring students' various disciplinary skills and cultural diversity into dialogue as conceptual tools for problem-solving. Enrollment limited.
Spring 2018 · Energy, Environment, and Society: Global Politics, Technologies, and Ecologies of the Water-Energy-Food Crises
Topics
- Introduction
- Linking Environments, Politics, and Societies in the 21st Century
- Historically Assessing the Water-Energy-Food Nexus / Crisis (1)
- Historically Assessing the Water-Energy-Food Nexus / Crisis (2)
- Going Global and Comparative: Comparative Environmental Governance
- Writing and Communication Workshop I
- Irrigation, Agriculture, and the Green Revolution
- Fishing Industries, the Blue Revolution, & Ocean Ecosystems (1)
- Fishing Industries, the Blue Revolution, & Ocean Ecosystems (2)
- Water & Food Security
- Writing and Communication Workshop II - Peer Review Session
- Power & Hydropower (1)
- Power & Hydropower (2)
- Urban Water Infrastructure & Waste Management (1)
- Urban Water Infrastructure & Waste Management (2)
- Water Law, Markets, & Neoliberalism (1)
- Water Law, Markets, & Neoliberalism (2)
- Gender, Race, & Water Security
- Virtual Waters: Integrating Energy, Waste, Agriculture, & Climate Policy (1)
- Virtual Waters: Integrating Energy, Waste, Agriculture, & Climate Policy (2)
- Knowledge & Science in Environmental Policy (1)
- Knowledge & Science in Environmental Policy (2)
- Environmental Justice, Energy Security, & Policy Change (1)
- Environmental Justice, Energy Security, & Policy Change (2)
- Race, Democracy, & Global Environmental Governance (1)
- Race, Democracy, & Global Environmental Governance (2)
Readings
- Ses #: 1 · Readings: No assigned readings
- Recommended :
- Ses #: 6 · Readings: No assigned readings
- Ses #: 7 · Readings: Fiege, Mark. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West . University of Washington Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780295980133
- Jorgensen, Dolly, Finn Arne Jorgensen, and Sara Pritchard, eds. “Environmentalists on Both Sides: Enactments in the California Rigs-to Reefs Debate.” In New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies . University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. ISBN: 9780822962427
- Cushman, Gregory. Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History . Cambridge University Press, 2014. Chapter 9. ISBN: 9781107655966
- Layzer, Judith. “The New England Fishereis Crisis.” Chapter 8 in The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy . CQ Press, 2015. ISBN: 9781452239897
- Cruz-Torres, Maria Luz and Pamela McElwee eds. “Contested Livelihoods: Gender, Fisheries, and Resistance in Northwestern Mexico.” In Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America . University of Arizona Press, 2017. ISBN: 9780816537952
- Ses #: 10 · Readings: No assigned readings
- Ses #: 11 · Readings: No assigned readings
- Tucker, Richard. “Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers: American Strategic Interest and the Global Spread of High Dams in the Early Cold War.” In Environmental Histories of the Cold War . Edited by J.R. McNeil and Corinna Unger. Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN: 9781107694353
- Ses #: 13 · Readings: No assigned readings
- Ses #: 14 · Readings: Steinberg, Theodore. “Introduction.” In Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England . University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780870239434
- Ses #: 15 · Readings: No assigned readings
- Layzer, Judith. “The Nation Tackles Pollution: The Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air and Water Acts.” Chapter 2 in The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy . CQ Press, 2015. ISBN: 9781452239897
- Cruz-Torres, Maria Luz and Pamela McElwee eds. Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America . University of Arizona Press, 2017. Chapters 1, 5, and 7. ISBN: 9780816537952
- Recommended:
- Ses #: 19 · Readings: No assigned reading
- Jones, Toby. Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia . Harvard University Press, 2010. Chapter 1. ISBN: 9780674049857
- Bullard, Robert. Dumping the Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality . Routledge, 2008. Chapter 2–3. ISBN: 9780813367921
- Cole, Luke and Sheila Foster. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement . NYU Press, 2001. Chapter 6. ISBN: 9780814715370
- Ses #: 25 · Readings: No assigned reading
- Ses #: 26 · Readings: No assigned reading
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: None U (Fall) Not offered regularly; consult department 3-0-9 units. HASS-H
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2018
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.