Environmental Studies

Aquatic environments make up more than 70% of the Earth’s surface. They host a huge diversity of life and ecosystems, many of which are vital to man. Topics covered in this module include diversity and ecology of freshwater and marine habitats and organisms, the impacts of humans on these environments, and the conservation and management of these critical resources. Overall learning outcomes include an appreciation and understanding of aquatic habitats, their physical and biological properties and their associated ecosystems. The importance of both marine and freshwater environments to Singapore will be highlighted.

This course interrogates the intersection of environmental studies with ethical and political theories of justice. It engages with issues of environmental justice and injustice on a global scale and provides special consideration to the intersecting dimensions of race, ethnicity, class, and gender as well as global economic inequality and settler colonialism. An important dimension of the course is learning about the understandings of environment and claims to justice mobilized by social movements seeking to address environmental injustice. Beginning with an introduction to theories of environment, justice, and scientific knowledge production and continuing with an investigation of themes in environmental in/justice, the course considers how capital flows and the distribution of power shape who has access to the necessities of life and to clean environments and who does not, and how the world itself is being radically altered by human action. Finally, it considers what ethical and political obligations humans may have to more-than-human beings, and how the struggle to protect these beings is often tied up with the social justice struggles of marginalized human groups. The course continually returns to the question of how plural understandings of justice and the environment underwrite or challenge environmental destruction and socio-economic inequality and examines the social movements locally and globally that are challenging and, in some cases, transforming such inequality. Through readings, in-class discussions, guest lectures, selected films and documentaries, and a final project, students reflect critically on the root causes of the uneven distribution of the basic resources necessary for life.

This course investigates the Earth’s environment over its geological past. It dives into historical geological timescales to better understand the climate and geography of the planet and its interactions with organisms.

Oceans cover most of the globe. Yet once we venture even a few meters from the shore, our understanding of the marine environment is necessarily mediated by technology, from the rudimentary underwater goggles used by divers for centuries to the latest remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) that are transforming our understanding of ocean ecologies. The ocean thus provides a perfect opportunity to explore the relationship among technology, society, and science. Science is often defined as a process of posing, testing, and producing increasingly refined hypotheses with data generated by experiments and measured with instruments. Yet if we look more closely, it becomes clear that rather than playing a subordinate role, instruments and technologies operate to confer scientific authority, to allow knowledge to “travel,” to mediate between science and popular culture, and even to define the method and content of science. This course examines how different “machines,” or technologies have produced understandings of the ocean across history, and places these technologies in their social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. It relates these technologies to key problems in the study of science, like authority, networks, translation, and representation. The result is to complicate our understanding of what science is, and to reveal the complex and evolving interconnections that link technology, and society and our understanding of the oceans.

This course considers what and how the humanities can contribute to key debates about environmental crisis, climate change, overconsumption, biodiversity loss, and sustainability. This course provides a general introduction to the emerging field of the environmental humanities, as well as to other forms of transdisciplinary and collaborative environmental scholarship in which humanities thinking plays a key role. The first part of this course introduces a selection of key humanities ideas about human relationships with place, technology, and the more-than-human world, drawing insights from across multiple disciplines and cultures. It also provides a concise overview of selected conversations and debates in the environmental humanities, presenting theories, issues, concrete examples, and case studies. The second part of the course explores collaborations between the humanities and other fields, including relation to natural sciences, as well as the relationship between scholarship, action, and intervention in relation to environmental humanities research. This part of the course includes an outdoor fieldtrip in addition to in-class activities. The course includes a number of guest lecturers by Aarhus University staff members affiliated with the Aarhus University Center for the Environmental Humanities as well as the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) group in order to bring a diversity of perspectives and examples of current research to the course.