STS.320
Environmental Conflict
Explores the complex interrelationships among humans and natural environments, focusing on non-western parts of the world in addition to Europe and the United States. Use of environmental conflict to draw attention to competing understandings and uses of "nature" as well as the local, national and transnational power relationships in which environmental interactions are embedded. In addition to utilizing a range of theoretical perspectives, subject draws upon a series of ethnographic case studies of environmental conflicts in various parts of the world.
Fall 2016
Topics
- Histories and Ideas of Nature
- Ecologies: Differing Understandings from Human Ecology, Cultural Ecology, Political Ecology, Postindustrial Ecology and Ecological Science Frameworks
- Species: Thinking Across Boundaries
- Knowledges: How We Know and Whose Knowledge Counts?
- Climate Change: Why it Takes More than Information to Change Minds
- Discussion of Final Papers
- Final Presentations and End of Semester Potluck
Readings
- [C] = Callison, Candis. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts . Duke University Press Books, 2014. ISBN: 9780822357872.
- [CO] = Colborn,Theo, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers. Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? - A Scientific Detective Story. Plume, 1997. ISBN: 9780452274143.
- [CR] = Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Hill and Wang, 2003. ISBN: 9780809016341.
- [CRU] = Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. UBC Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780774811873.
- [H] = Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness . Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780971757585.
- [L] = Langston, Nancy. Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES. Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780300171372.
- [R] = Raffles, Hugh. Insectopedia. Vintage, 2011. ISBN: 9781400096961.
- Tracking environmental conflict: How far will ideas of the “Anthropocene” take us?
- [CR] Chapter 1: The View from Walden.
- [CR] Chapter 2: Landscape and Patchwork.
- [CR] Chapter 3: Seasons of Want and Plenty.
- [CRU] Chapter 2: Constructing Life Stories: Glaciers as Social Spaces.
- [WI] Chapter 1: Country and City.
- [WI] Chapter 2: A Problem of Perspective.
- [WI] Chapter 3: Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral.
- [WI] Chapter 10: Enclosures, Commons and Communities.
- [WO] Chapter 6: A Fallen World.
- [WO] Chapter 8: Scrambling for Place.
- [WO] Chapter 9: The Ascent of Man.
- Cronon, William, ed. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. ISBN: 9780393315110.
- Janowitz, Morris. “Introduction.” In The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment . Edited by Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie. University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN: 9780226646114.
- Park, Robert E. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment.” Chapter 1 in The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment. Edited by Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie. University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN: 9780226646114.
- ———. “The Great Basin Shoshonean Indians: An Example of a Family Level of Sociocultural Integration.” Chapter 6 in Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader . Edited by Michael R. Dove and Carol Carpenter. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. ISBN: 9781405111379.
- [WO] Chapter 11: Clements and the Climax Community.
- Robbins, Paul. “The Hatchet and the Seed.” Chapter 1 in Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 9781405102667.
- What kind of actors are humans and non-humans? What are the “ontology in the Anthropocene” debates and why should we care?
- Callon, Michel. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and Fishermen of St. Brieuc’s Bay.” In Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Edited by John Law. Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1987. ISBN: 9780710208026.
- Latour, Bruno. “Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency.” In Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780199256051.
- Latour, Bruno. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” Chapter 6 in Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science . Edited by Karin D. Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay. Sage Publications, 1983. ISBN: 9780803997820.
- ———. “The Message from the Mud: Making Meaning Out of Microbes in Monterey Bay.” Chapter 1 in Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas . University of California Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780520250628.
- [M] Chapter 1: Guided Mobility.
- [M] Chapter 2: The Professoriate of the Hunt.
- [M] Chapter 3: The Coming of the Gun.
- [M] Chapter 4: Tsetse Invasions.
- [M] Chapter 5: The Professoriate of the Hunt and the Tsetse Fly.
- Mapping the Politics of Conservation; Exploring Ethnographic Methods and the Meeting of Ethnography, Oral History, and Theory
- [W] Chapter 1: Battling for the Marine Park.
- [W] Chapter 2: “When People Were As Worthless as Insects”: History, Popular Memory, and Tourism on Chole.
- [W] Chapter 3: The Making and Unmaking of “Community.”
- [W] Chapter 4: Where There Is No Nature.
- Lutz, Catherine. “The Gender of Theory.” Chapter 12 in Women Writing Culture . Edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon. University of California Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780520202085.
- Occupational Health, Environmental Justice, and Postindustrial Ecologies: The Co-Production of Race, Class, and Toxicity
- [HE] Chapter 7: Nuclearity at Work.
- [HE] Chapter 8: Invisible Exposures.
- [HE] Chapter 9: Hopes for the Irradiated Body.
- [S] Chapter 1: White City’s Ghosts.
- [S] Chapter 2: The Progressive Allure of the Worker’s Ills.
- Nash, Linda. “Modern Landscapes and Ecological Bodies.” Chapter 4 in Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780520248878.
- ———. “Contesting the Space of Disease.” Chapter 5 in Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780520248878.
- [MU] Chapter 1: Man in a Box: Building-Machines and the Science of Comfort.
- [MU] Chapter 2: Building Ladies into the Office Machine.
- [MU] Chapter 4: Indoor Pollution at the Encounter of Toxicology and Popular Epidemiology.
- From Endocrine Disruptors to Epigenetics: Rethinking Environmental Health
- [L] Chapter 2: Before World War II: Chemicals, Risk, and Regulation.
- [L] Chapter 3: Help for Women over Forty.
- [L] Chapter 4: Bigger, Stronger Babies with Diethylstilbestrol.
- [L] Chapter 5: Modern Meat: Hormones in Livestock.
- [CO] Chapter 1: Omens.
- [CO] Chapter 2: Hand-Me-Down Poisons.
- [CO] Chapter 3: Chemical Messengers.
- [CO] Chapter 4: Hormone Havoc.
- [CRU] Chapter 1: Memories of the Little Ice Age.
- [CRU] Chapter 2: Constructing Life Stories: Glaciers as Social Spaces.
- [CRU] Chapter 5: Bringing Icy Regions Home: John Muir in Alaska.
- [CRU] Chapter 8: Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories.
- Wohlforth, Charles. “The Whale.” Chapter 1 in The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change . North Point Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780865477148.
- ———. “The Iñupiat.” Chapter 2 in The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change . North Point Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780865477148.
- From “Fracking” to Citizen Science
- Garland, Elizabeth. “Prologue: Three Tales from the Wilds.” In State of Nature: Colonial Power, Neoliberal Capital, and Wildlife Management in Tanzania: Volume One. Dissertation. University of Chicago, December 2006.
- ———. “Capturing Nature’s Potential: Extraction and Sovereignty in the Nation’s ‘Protected’ Areas.” In State of Nature: Colonial Power, Neoliberal Capital, and Wildlife Management in Tanzania: Volume One. Dissertation. University of Chicago, December 2006.
- Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936.” Chapter 3 in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Service . Routledge, 1990. ISBN: 9780415902946.
- Raffles, Hugh. “A Conjoined Fate.” Orion 29, no. 1 (2010): 16–27.
- Walley, Christine. “Deindustrializing Chicago: A Daughter’s Story.” Chapter 6 in The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do about It . Edited by Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman. University of California Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780520259713.
- ———. “Bibliography.” In Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago . University of Chicago Press, 2013. ISBN: 9780226871806.
- Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780971757585.
- Callison, Candis. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts . Duke University Press Books, 2014. ISBN: 9780822357872.
Prerequisites & course information
Same subject as 21A.429[J] Prereq: Permission of instructor Acad Year 2027-2028: G (Spring) Acad Year 2028-2029: Not offered 3-0-9 units
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Fall 2016
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.