Politics 228: Political Ecology

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of “political ecology,” a framework for thinking about environmental politics that combines insights from geography, anthropology, history, political economy, and ecology. Through the lens of case studies from around the world, the course critically examines the origins and key contributions of political ecology, with a focus on three themes:

1) Nature-society relations, or the challenges of weaving history, economy, and power into the study of the environment (and vice versa);

2) The politics of resource access and control in diverse settings from Amazonian forests to biotech laboratories;

3) The (dis)connections between environmental movements and social justice struggles.