The Political Ecology of Environmental Justice

Promoting a more sustainable world is interwoven within power dynamics that are characterized by key questions about science and knowledge, nature and culture, environmental justice and advocacy.  This course explores these questions and investigates the political and cultural basis of environmentalisms and their manifestations based on a political ecology perspective.  

We will investigate compelling theoretical perspectives for analyzing environmental case studies to reveal key insights on the power dynamics of environmental conflicts and issues and their implications for environmental and social justice.  By identifying how the environment and environmental and social justice are defined from a scientific standpoint as well as in culturally specific ways by communities, activists, social movements, governments, and private sector actors, it becomes clearer how environments are negotiated and emerge in different ways.  In this course, students design their own "environment" in which they establish the power dynamics through a game simulation exercise based on a real-life case study.