We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2015-2016 Sustainability Course Development Awards!
The Sustainability Course Development Awards competition is designed to incentivize the development of new sustainability courses or course conversions.
New Course Development Award Winners
Dr. John Hartigan
Professor
Department of Anthropology
Cultures of Sustainability
This course guides students in recognizing how ecological concerns are articulated and perceived in different cultural contexts. Environmentalists in the U.S. and Europe often face challenges both in convincing peoples around the world to participate in conservation projects and in recognizing local, situated (particularly indigenous) forms of caring about ecological health and social equity. Notions of “nature” are fundamentally culture-bound, entangled with concepts of personhood and agency, power and risk, and cosmological orderings of humans and nonhumans. Beginning with an explanation of culture and its dynamics, this course will survey ecological activities in a range of settings (China, Indonesia, Brazil, and Europe), providing students a comparative framework for recognizing the criteria mobilized as people assess whether or how their environments are in peril. The analytical foundation is anthropological, emphasizing biocultural perspectives and recent work in cultural ecology, but the course will encourage interdisciplinary formulations of student research projects. Some of our case-studies will draw from science and technology studies, and students will be assisted in developing proposals that tap and mobilize various forms of expertise and knowledge claims. We will also spend time considering disciplinary debates over the Anthropocene (how to understand its dimensions and consequences) and sampling the exciting new development of “multispecies ethnography” (projects that analyze nonhumans’ roles in social and political formations).
Flags: Global Cultures, Writing, Ethics & Leadership
Dr. Elizabeth Scala
Professor
Department of English
Literature and Global Society: Food Writing
This course will be available in Spring 2019.
Flags: Writing, Ethics & Leadership
Dr. C.J. Alvarez
Assistant Professor
Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies
The Environment & Mexican America
Commercial agriculture, mining, oil and gas extraction, and construction are all industries upon which American society depends, they all have major environmental consequences, and they have all been built in substantial ways on Mexican and Mexican American labor. This course traces the history of these complex relationships.
Flags: Cultural Diversity in the United States