Ecofeminism: Environmental Social Movements and Anthropology

3 units

This course provides a survey of environmental social movements around the world and over time, in the process challenging commonly held perceptions about environmentalism and environmental movements. Specifically, it demonstrates that environmental social movements are often as much or more about people, identity and human rights than they are about protecting the environment. In addition to juxtaposing dominant traditions of American environmentalism with environmental movements in other parts of the world, the course focuses in on new and emerging social movements that are often transnational in scope but local in scale. These new movements offer holistic reinterpretations of human-environment relationships, identities and political and economic organization in their attempts to transcend socio-environmental inequalities. Throughout, the course draws on social scientists' (especially anthropologists') descriptive interpretations and critical theoretical analyses of various environmental social movements and the differences that constitute them.