Environmental Studies

In this course students learn about the atmosphere, ocean, and land components of the carbon cycle. The course covers global issues such as ocean acidification and how to get off our fossil fuel "addiction," as well as how to deal with climate change denialists.

This course equips students to understand causes, effects, framings of, and responses to climate change and related phenomena around the world, from a critical social science perspective. Building on anthropology's long-standing engagement with social transformation and human-environment relations, and more recent environmental turns across social sciences and humanities, students explore how recent identifications of climate crisis and debates around the Anthropocene are situated in longer histories of environmental change and social injustice, as well as their contemporary manifestations and politics. The course is grounded in empirical, ethnographic work that explores what environmental and social changes mean and entail for people, communities, organizations, and nations around the world - across Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Its approach to questions of climate and environment emerges from sustained attention to the afterlives of empire and ongoing colonial relations between Global North and South. Through a genuine engagement with decolonial and indigenous scholarship, as well as critical studies emerging from the Global South, the course offers students a unique opportunity to engage with a diverse range of analyses and discussions pertaining to the environment and climate change. 

This course examines the primacy of aesthetics in comprehending and responding to environmental crises by considering the role of the arts in addressing environmental disasters;  whether the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be grounded in scientific understanding; and the aesthetic dimensions of climate change, wastelands, wetlands, and wilderness. Attending the connection between historical conditions and philosophical notions, the course explores the emergence of environmental aesthetics within the European philosophical tradition of the mid-eighteenth century, concurrent with the first industrial revolution and rise of capitalism. It reviews classical and contemporary texts (from Immanuel Kant and Alexander Baumgarten to Peter Sloterdijk, Sianne Ngai, and Yuriko Saito), and introduces key categories: the beautiful, sublime and picturesque; landscape, scenery, environment; atmosphere, climate; Nature, the Anthropocene–and its critical alternatives. Deploying these concepts, the course analyzes contemporary works of art and literature grounded in awareness of ecological conditions quite different from older traditions (e.g. of landscape painting and nature poetry), examining the work of artists such as Olafur Eliasson and his former students, and science fiction writers from Mary Shelley to Kim Stanley Robinson. Finally, this course derives an important lesson from the history of aesthetics and its engagement with the environs: the aesthetic pertains as much to the background as to foreground of attention; to ambient conditions of everyday life as to works of art and unique sites. Thus, the course moves in the direction of a revaluation of our modes of life, with particular attention to our homely environmental aesthetics: the banal, quotidian, routine, and habitual aspects of our lives, homes, and streets. This is the arena in which the impact of environmental crises–and efforts to remediate them–is felt most acutely: in our patterns of consumption of energy and materials, how we dress, do chores, feed ourselves, transport, and communicate. Through these intimate investigations, the course considers how contemporary ideas of the environment call for a rethinking of aesthetics, as well as aesthetic approaches to environmental remediation. 

This course focuses on the estuarine, coastal, and marine processes and morphological features that determine the morphodynamic behavior of coastal systems. Coastal morphodynamics is defined as the mutual co-adjustment of coastal landforms and processes. Emphasis is on the behavior of sedimentary coastal systems, such as beaches and dune coasts, barrier island systems, tidal inlets, estuaries, and deltas. It includes the behavior of both sandy and muddy coasts. The time scales involved vary from less than a second (e.g., intra-wave processes; short-term) to decades (e.g., the coastal response to sea level rise; long-term). The course starts with the dynamics of wave-, tide- and current-driven processes and the effect on sediment transport processes and associated morphological change. The second part of the course deals with the morphodynamic character of different types of coastal systems. This is analyzed by discussing, evaluating, and quantifying the dominant processes, the relevant morphological features, and sedimentary products. Exercises, papers, and case studies are an integral part of the course and are used to develop skills in analyzing and solving coastal problems. The course also contains several lectures on coastal instrumentation (for example, remote sensing) and on the societal relevance of coastal processes in mitigating coastal erosion.

This course examines the economics of climate change. Topics include technology and the history of economic thought, the economic evaluation of climate change, and climate change and public policy instruments.

This course provides a sociological perspective on economic, social, and political processes, focusing especially on global social change and sustainable development. Students acquire the knowledge required to understand and critically examine the discussions pursued about the global social change that marks modernity, focusing especially on the post-war period. The course includes four modules, this is the third module: Global Sustainability and Environmental Sociology. The module focuses on sustainability and environmental sociology. Based on the classical and contemporary theories addressed in the first module, the third module provides a specialization in contemporary sociological perspectives on sustainability and environmental issues. Different aspects of sustainability and environmental challenges are reviewed based on different perspectives of the theory of science and the social sciences, aiming to provide a detailed understanding of how environmental problems can be framed and understood from different social and political perspectives. Furthermore, the module considers different types of political and social action to achieve change, such as different political solutions and changes in consumption, and everyday life/lifestyle.

This course is specialized for international students. It offers a contemporary history of political ecology in France, from the mid-19th century to present day. The course covers how the environmental issue has gradually become more and more political and cultural over the years, and how historiography has tended to favor the hypothesis of a delay in the emergence of this issue in France, in contrast to the situation in the United States. After recalling the main historical milestones (the creation of national parks in the United States, the National Trust in Great Britain), it looks at the first forms of identifying and safeguarding areas identified as "natural," using the example of tourism and the protection of remarkable sites. The course discusses how this process developed and amplified in the twentieth century, as industrialization and urbanization increased, with experiments such as allotments and debates on the return to the land; and finally, in the last third of the twentieth century, intellectual and popular movements took up environmental issues (Friends of the Earth, Larzac movement) and helped place them on the public agenda. The course reflects on the convergences and tensions as seen from the cities or from the countryside, by linking two historiographical traditions: urban and environmental history, and rural and agricultural history.

This course focuses on the social and cultural relations produced by resource management projects, and explores the global and local frames through a series of world-wide case studies of mining, oil, gas, and forestry projects. Resource projects have long been important sites of cultural contact, environmental impact and anthropological interest: whether first contact with prospectors, disputes with multinational companies, sustainable development initiatives or civil-society monitoring, resource exploration and extraction has long played an important part in the interface with non-western and indigenous peoples and the forces of globalization. The course also examines the potential for anthropological skills and knowledge to contribute to an industry that has increasingly to account for its social and environmental impacts to a global constituency.

This course covers how to design and implement tropical forest restoration programs that are adapted to local biophysical and social situations. It focuses on the initial restoration phase and discusses how to make wise choices of methods, species, and propagation techniques in relation to given restoration objectives and with participation of rural people in the implementation. Topics include biological aspects of tropical forest landscape restoration; seed supply, genetic aspects, and climate change; tree seed procurement and propagation; and implementation, monitoring, and management of tropical forest landscape restoration.

This course gives students an understanding of practical aspects of data analysis, handling, and visualization for datasets related to geo and environmental sciences.