Environmental Studies

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.

This course examines human relationships with ecological and material environments. It looks at diverse cultural perceptions of and approaches to the environment, the relationship between nature and culture, and anthropology’s contribution to contemporary ecological and climate debates.

This course provides the conceptual tools needed to understand, analyze, and critically and constructively engage with ongoing societal transformations induced by climate change, biodiversity, and other ecological crises, colloquially known as green transition. It builds on scholarship and meso-level theories founded in environmental and climate sociology, branching also into other literatures to ask foundational questions about society-wide change towards sustainability: how much of it is currently happening across societal sectors, domains, and levels; how it has or is currently being brought about; and what shapes, conditions, or hampers more of it. The course begins by reviewing debates on two contrasting diagnoses: the risk society diagnosis of Ulrich Beck and the ecological modernization diagnosis of Maarten Hajer, John Dryzek, and others. At stake is the question of the place of environmental concern, policy, and practice in reworking (late) modernity. From here, the course delves into the main institutional vectors of green social change, covering in turn questions of socio-technical change (green technological innovation, changing infrastructures); political-economic change (shifting modes of governance and politics, new circular market models); mobilization-driven change (environmental social movements, urban green communities); changing North-South relations (new globalized inequalities, climate justice activism); everyday practice change (emerging consumptions habits, new social distinctions and divisions); and cultural value change (continuity and change in moral valuations of ‘nature’ in the Anthropocene). Throughout, the focus is on understanding present-day green social change in light of historical experience and meso-level sociological theory, with a view to taking stock of what near-future changes lie ahead. Alongside examining the various substantive dimensions of green transition, it also discusses adequate methodological strategies affiliated with the different problem complexes and vectors of social change. Throughout, students work on aligning analytical and methodological strategies via case analyses.

This course is an introduction to the key principles of sustainable development and the application of such principles in real world situations. These principles include: the social, environmental and economic pillars of sustainable development; global population, poverty and aid considerations; and the value of multiple sets of knowledge, in particular indigenous knowledge. A diverse set of case studies and issues of concern are addressed throughout the course and include: climate change; resources and waste; circular economy; biodiversity offsets; tourism industry; local community-government partnerships; and the options before us for the future development of human society in a world of limited carrying capacity.

This course discusses some of the underlying issues which are causing large environmental challenges on the continent of Africa, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Topics include the concept of nature as imagined in the 21st century; the "commons" and property rights, and how differing views of those in Africa have given rise to different problems; and the political economy of conservation, the connection of sustainability, and inequality of renewal.