Follow the Thing: Global Commodities & Environment

3 units

Who picked your strawberries? Is your produce still local if the hands that harvested it traveled thousands of miles to do the job? This course re-examines the root causes of the global and local environmental problems we read about every day, with an emphasis on historical and contemporary drivers of human migration. Topics include the production and consumption of natural resources, the politics of migration and agriculture, and the cross-border commodification of human labor and the environment. Anthropology is historically associated with the study of remote societies and exotic places often imagined as having little everyday connection with the rest of the world. This course will challenge students to reconsider the meanings of global and local by introducing new social scientific approaches to studying the key problems that have connected (and disconnected) diverse human populations throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries: growing disparities in material wealth, natural resource depletion, energy overconsumption, inequitable access to care, and beyond.