Undergraduate Courses Spring 2025
Classes are listed alphabetically according to their first department listing. For the most up-to-date listings, check the Yale Course Search website. To add or remove a course from this list, email environmentalhumanities@yale.edu.
Last updated November 2024
AFAM 164 / PLSC 263 / URBN 304 (23344)
The Politics of “The Wire”: HBO’s Portrayal of the American City
Allison Harris
MW 1:30-2:20pm
Areas SO
This class uses HBO’s groundbreaking series “The Wire” to investigate cities, their problems, and their politics. We watch all five seasons of the show as social scientists and use it to learn about important social scientific concepts and theories, and apply those theories to such phenomena as the politics of crime, policing, and local elections. Each week, the assigned readings—articles and book excerpts from political science as well as other social sciences—highlight the social scientific concepts displayed in the assigned episodes and provide context for lectures. All of the assignments work together to expose students to social science, how social science is conducted, and how political science can help us better understand the world around us.
AFAM 229 / ENGL 3129 (12009)
Black Geographies: Space & Place in African American Literature
Elleza Kelley
Day/Time TBA
Areas HU
This course explores African-American literature through the framework of space and place. From the slave ship to the spaceship, from the plantation complex and along the underground railroad, from the kitchenette of Chicago, the Harlem airshaft and the rooftop, to the mountains and bayous of maroon communities, we consider spaces both conceptual and material, spaces of incarceration and liberation, routes of migration, cartographies of fugitivity, and patterns of flight. Like black study and black cultural production in the Americas, “black geographies” must be understood as always operating in what artist Xaviera Simmons has called “a feedback loop”: the Middle Passage wraps back around like a Mobius strip, reconstituted as the site of an imagined black Atlantis. Anxieties about the inhuman status of the black body torque against time, giving way to utopian visions where “space is the place,” where the galactic is figured as both a destination and a place of origin. Thus, we must examine and trouble these circulations of space and time in ways that can account for their multiple meanings and varying mobilizations. Reading works by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and more, we think deeply and widely about black space and place.
AFAM 329 / ER&M 310 / AMST 312 / WGSS 298 (20824)
Postcolonial Cities of the West
Fadila Habchi
W 3:30-5:20pm
Areas HU
Examination of various texts and films pertaining to the representation of postcolonial cities in the global north and a range of social, political, and cultural issues that concern those who inhabit these spaces.
AMST 029 / ENGL 0729 / HUMS 023 (22399)
Henry Thoreau
Michael Warner
Day/Time TBA
Areas HU
Henry Thoreau played a critical role in the development of environmentalism, American prose, civil rights, and the politics of protest. We read his writing in depth, and with care, understanding it both in its historical context and in its relation to present concerns of democracy and climate change. We read his published writing and parts of the journal, as well as biographical and contextual material. The class makes a field trip to Walden Pond and Concord, learning about climate change at Walden as revealed by Thoreau’s unparalleled documentation of his biotic surroundings. Student’s consider Thoreau’s place in current debates about the environment and politics, and are encouraged to make connection with those debates in a final paper. Previously ENGL 029.
AMST 163 / HIST 120 / EVST 120 / HSHM 204 (20403)
American Environmental History
Paul Sabin
MW 11:35am-12:25pm
Areas HU, WR
Ways in which people have shaped and been shaped by the changing environments of North America from precolonial times to the present. Migration of species and trade in commodities; the impact of technology, agriculture, and industry; the development of resources in the American West and overseas; the rise of modern conservation and environmental movements; the role of planning and impact of public policies
AMST 258 / ER&M 258 / EVST 258 / WGSS 258 (22261)
Wildness in the North American Imagination: What Was the Wild?
Dolma Ombadykow
T 1:30-3:20pm
Areas HU
This course examines the history of natural science, with a particular attention to nineteenth and early-twentieth century colonial understandings of the wild, the civil, the self, and the other. The wild—whether the American West, the Gobi Desert, or the Amazon River—conjures visions of a place set apart by space, but also by time. In the western imagination, the wild is a decidedly historical—perhaps even prehistoric—place. Does the wild still exist, and what might the wild of the future look like? Centering critique from Black studies, Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and science and technology studies, this course asks: how have institutions like museums, zoos, the military, governments, and NGOs shaped our understandings of who, what, and when counts as wild? This course encourages students to think against dominant narrations of agriculture, conservation, natural resource extraction, tourism, and the promises of global commerce to attend to alternative formations of the natural. What roles do race, gender, sexuality, labor, and class play in our understandings of the wilderness? What does it mean for the wild to be populated, engineered, manicured, curated, or preserved? Each week, students will open class by introducing us to a place or a concept that pushes at the conceptual limits of the wild. Examples may be places or experiences of personal importance, like the family fish camp or an ancestral homeland, but equally permitted are explorations of, as examples, the rats of the New York City subway, the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill, metastatic cancer, or microplastics.
AMST 310 / HSAR 447 (20813)
The American West: Art, Land, Politics
Jennifer Raab
W 1:30-3:20pm
Areas HU
The American West holds a powerful place in the cultural and political imagination of the United States. This seminar considers changing conceptions of the land across media—from maps and guidebooks, to paintings, panoramas, and photographs, to earth art and satellite imagery. We examine the politics of water rights; artists’ engagement with ecological questions; the representation of railroads, National Parks, ghost towns, and highways; the mythology of the frontier; and the visual construction of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance. The course emphasizes close attention to works of art, archival research, and developing term papers that engage with the Beinecke’s extraordinary Western Americana Collection. Classes are held at the Beinecke as well as the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Peabody Museum.
AMST 459 / ANTH 465 (20007)
Multispecies Worlds
Kathryn Dudley
Th 1:30-3:20pm
Areas SO
This seminar explores the relational and material worlds that humans create in concert with other-than-human species. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the problematic subject of anthropology—Anthropos—we seek to pose new questions about the fate of life worlds in the present epoch of anthropogenic climate change. Our readings track circuits of knowledge from anthropology and philosophy to geological history, literary criticism, and environmental studies as we come to terms with the loss of biodiversity, impending wildlife extinctions, and political-economic havoc wrought by global warming associated with the Anthropocene. A persistent provocation guides our inquiry: What multispecies worldings become possible to recognize and cultivate when we dare to decenter the human in our politics, passions, and aspirations for life on a shared planet?
AMST 467 / HSHM 469 / MCDB 469
Biology of Humans through History, Science, and Society
Valerie Horsley
MW 1:00-2:15pm
Areas HU, SCI, WR
This course is a collaborative course between HSHM and MCDB that brings together humanists and scientists to explore questions of biology, history, and identity. The seminar is intended for STEM and humanities majors interested in understanding the history of science and how it impacts identity, particularly race and gender, in the United States. The course explores how scientific methods and research questions have impacted views of race, sex, gender, gender identity, heterosexism, and obesity. Students learn and evaluate scientific principles and concepts related to biological theories of human difference. There are no prerequisites, this class is open to all.
ANTH 229 / HSHM 254 (22789)
The Anthropology of Outer Space
Lisa Messeri
TTh 1:00-2:15pm
Areas SO
Examination of the extraterrestrial through consideration of ideas in anthropology and aligned disciplines. Students discuss, write, and think about outer space as anthropologists and find the value of exploring this topic scientifically, socially, and philosophically. Previously ANTH 399.
ANTH 308 / WGSS 407 / WGSS 607 / ANTH 659 (20685)
Feminist & Queer Ethnographies: Borders and Boundaries
Eda Pepi
T 1:30-3:20pm
Areas HU, SO
This seminar gives students a storm’s eye view of contemporary crises, where borders are as volatile as the ring of a wedding bell or the birth of a child. Feminist and queer ethnographies explore the geopolitical lines and social divides that define and confine us. Manifesting through laws, social norms, and physical barriers, borders and boundaries shape our identities, turning the intimate act of living into a fiercely political one. We consider them as lived experiences that cross militarized lines—as the everyday realities of families, detention centers, workplaces, universities, and even nightclubs. Our readings trace the fluidity of borders, the extension of the global north’s influence, and the internal colonialism that redraws the landscapes of nations. Contemporary ways of bridging time and space are profoundly gendered, sexualized racialized, and class-specific, capable of materializing with sudden intensity for some and remaining imperceptible to others, morphing from ephemeral lines to seemingly permanent barriers. The course is an invitation to think beyond the map – to understand borders as something people live, challenge, and transform. Our intellectual battleground is the liminal space where geopolitics meets the raw human struggle for recognition, peeling back the layers of political theatre to witness the making and unmaking of our borderlands. Anchored by a “radical hope for living otherwise,” the seminar also aims to expand the intellectual horizons necessary for dreaming of, and working towards, the world to come.
ANTH 318 / SAST 308 / URBN 412 (20026)
Peril and Possibility in the South Asian City
Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan
W 3:30-5:20pm
Areas SO
For the first time in human history, at some point in the last decade a majority of humankind became city dwellers. A fifth of these city-dwelling masses inhabit the massive and massifying megacities of the Indian sub-continent. Karachi, Dhaka, and Bombay frequently threaten to be the most populous urban centers on earth, and it may only be faith in the accuracy of government census data that defers this dubious honor. For while these cities are plugged into the global flows of people, ideas, things, and capital; such developments also bring with them anomie, alienation, dispossession, and depredations. Historical social conflicts born of a century of European colonialism and millennia of caste society have in some cases been mitigated, in others intensified in ways both insidious and invidious. Much ink has been spilt on contouring both the perils and possibilities attending the urbanization of the sub-continent. This course explores a ground-up view of the many ways in which the urban denizens of these bustling cities where pasts and futures collide, experience this collision. While this course draws on interdisciplinary scholarly examinations engaging the urban emergent, it focuses on the realm of experience, desire and affect germinating in the city. Students sample ethnography, art, speculative fiction, and film to map out the textures of this complex and mutating fabric. In doing so we chart the emergence and application of new ideas and cultures, practices and constraints, identities and conflicts in the contemporary urban landscapes.
ANTH 373 (24043)
Water and Society: Culture, Life, and Values
Lav Kanoi
W 9:25am-11:15am
Areas HU, SO
Water has become an urgent theme not just in current anthropology, but in development studies and environmental studies more generally. Beyond questions of scarcity and sustainability, water allows human life to flourish, and without water, there would be no civilization. Yet water is not equitably distributed across time or space, leading to contestation and conflict around water. Against such a background of strife, this course examines how human beings have related to water, to other life forms, and to each other through the control of water, in different historical moments and different parts of the world. The seminar is organized around four porous thematic clusters: (i) “urban water”, to do with cities and urban industrial life; (ii) “agrarian water”, to do with rivers, irrigation systems, and agrarian life; (iii) “rural water”, to do with coasts, lakes, dams and rural life; and (iv) and “living water”, to do with social, cultural and political values, and human and more-than-human life. This seminar introduces students to the everyday values of water, as well as the everyday politics of water, including the production of water and its attendant politics at the level of the nation-state as well as the city municipality while also being attentive to the moral ecologies of water. By studying water in different ways through the lens of culture, environment, social justice, and spirituality or faith, students develop a nuanced understanding of development, urbanization, environmental justice, and climate change.
ANTH 414 / EAST 417 (20034)
Hubs, Mobilities, and World Cities
Helen Siu
T 1:30-3:20pm
Areas SO
Analysis of urban life in historical and contemporary societies. Topics include capitalist and postmodern transformations; class, gender, ethnicity, and migration; and global landscapes of power and citizenship.
ANTH 423 / ANTH 623 (20036)
The Anthropology of Possible Worlds
Paul Kockelman
M 9:25-11:15am
Areas SO
This course focuses on the nature of possible worlds: literary worlds (Narnia), ideological worlds (the world according to a particular political stance), psychological worlds (what someone remembers to be the case, wishes to be the case, or believes to be the case), environmental worlds (possible environmental futures), virtual worlds (the World of Warcraft), and—most of all—ethnographic works in which the actual and possible worlds of others are represented (the world according to the ancient Maya). We don’t focus on the contents of such worlds per se, but rather on the range of resources people have for representing, regimenting, and residing in such worlds; and the roles such resources play in mediating social relations and cultural values.
ARCG 399 / EVST 399 (20923)
Agriculture: Origins, Evolution, Crises
Harvey Weiss
Th 3:30-5:20pm
Areas SO
Analysis of the societal and environmental drivers and effects of plant and animal domestication, the intensification of agroproduction, and the crises of agroproduction: land degradation, societal collapses, sociopolitical transformation, sustainability, and biodiversity.
ARCG 473 / EVST 473 / NELC 373 / ENV 793 (20925)
Climate Change, Societal Collapse, and Resilience
Harvey Weiss
Th 9:25-11:15am
Areas HU, SO
The coincidence of societal collapses throughout history with decadal and century-scale abrupt climate change events. Challenges to anthropological and historical paradigms of cultural adaptation and resilience. Examination of archaeological and historical records and high-resolution sets of paleoclimate proxies.
ARCH 160 / URBN 160 (22935)
Introduction to Urban Studies
Ife Vanable
MW 11:35am-12:50pm
Areas HU, SO
An introduction to key topics, research methods, and practices in urban studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry and action rooted in the experience of cities. As physical artifacts, the advent of large cities have reflected rapid industrialization and advanced capitalism. They are inseparable from the organization of economic life; the flourishing of cultures; and the formation of identities. They are also places where power is concentrated and inequalities are (re)produced. Debates around equity are filtered through urban environments, where struggles over jobs, housing, education, mobility, public health, and public safety are front and center. The course is organized as a colloquium with numerous guests. Accessible entirely online, there will also be live, in-person events, with social distancing and face masks/shields, available to students in New Haven.
ARCH 312 / HSAR 312 (23113)
Modern Architecture in a Global Context, 1750–Present
Craig Buckley
TTh 2:30-3:20pm
Areas HU
Architects, movements, and buildings central to the development of modern architecture from the mid eighteenth century through to the present. Common threads and differing conceptions of modern architecture around the globe. The relationship of architecture to urban transformation; the formulation of new typologies; architects’ responses to new technologies and materials; changes in regimes of representation and media. Architects include Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, John Soane, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, Louis Kahn, and Kenzo Tange.
ARCH 332 (22940)
Cultural AI: Machine Vision, Art, and Design
Brennan Buck
Th 1:30-3:20pm
More than any other technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to transform the fields of art and design over the next decade. In addition to its economic impact as it replaces and alters human labor, machine vision and cognition will alter and displace human creativity. Already, AI has added a series of invisible layers–filters and lenses–to how we see and create our environment. Understanding this new machine-mediated visual culture is critical to addressing its growth, finding potentials and opportunities for intervention, and identifying avenues for critique and resistance. Readings and discussion trace the historical role of algorithms in human culture and the understanding of creation and design as an algorithmic–even machinic–process. They chart the shift from the explicit code of software to the black box of machine learning and the birth of what Lev Manovich calls ‘cultural AI’–a filter over our collective imagination as technology is incorporated into image-making, -selection, and -viewing platforms. Students also work with AI platforms such as Runway ML to develop design proposals that take a critical and aesthetically specific stance on the current and impending impact of AI on cultural production.
ARCH 392 (22903)
Writing About Place
Cynthia Zarin
Day/Time TBA
Areas HU, WR
An exploration of reading and writing about place. Definitions of home; different meanings and intent of travel. Readings include exemplary contemporary essays from the eighteenth century to the present. Workshop for assigned student essays. Formerly ENGL 478.
EALL 225 / EAST 429 (21743)
A Culinary History of China
Instructor TBA
Day/Time TBA
Areas HU
Food is a central aspect of a culture, and culinary traditions often become tokens of identity. There are complex historical and social factors behind culinary choices. The Chili peppers now widely used in Chinese cooking were introduced in the region only in the 16th century. What socio-economic changes made this new spice so prevalent in Chinese cuisine so quickly? This seminar uses food as a lens to study major developments in Chinese history. We will think of food particularly in three ways; as a material actor, whose presence or absence affected historical events; as a metaphor, used by intellectuals to discuss proper government and other political topics; as a cultural mediator to shape identities in the social imaginary.
ENGL 121 (21296)
Styles of Professional Prose: Writing About Cities
Pamela Newton
Day/Time TBA
Areas WR
A seminar and workshop in the conventions of good writing in a specific field. Each section focuses on one professional kind of writing and explores its distinctive features through a variety of written and oral assignments, in which students both analyze and practice writing in the field. Section topics, which change yearly, are listed at the beginning of each term on the English department website. This course may be repeated for credit in a section that treats a different genre or style of writing; may not be repeated for credit toward the major. ENGL 121 and ENGL 421 may not be taken for credit on the same topic. Prerequisite: ENGL 114, 115, 120, or another writing-intensive course at Yale.
ENGL 3467 / EVST 224 (22341)
Writing About The Environment
Alan Burdick
T 9:25-11:15am
Areas WR
Exploration of ways in which the environment and the natural world can be channeled for literary expression. Reading and discussion of essays, reportage, and book-length works, by scientists and non-scientists alike. Students learn how to create narrative tension while also conveying complex—sometimes highly technical—information; the role of the first person in this type of writing; and where the human environment ends and the non-human one begins. Previously ENGL 418. Admission by permission of the instructor only. Students interested in the course should email the instructor at alan.burdick@gmail.com with the following information: 1.) A few paragraphs describing your interest in taking the class. 2.) A non-academic writing sample that best represents you.
ENGL 4898 (22409)
The Sensuous Life of Empire
Sunny Xiang & Rasheed Tazudeen
T 9:25-11:15am
Areas HU
This course examines the cross-sections of material culture, imperial consumption, and racial fetishism. In thinking the material traces of empire—its histories, archives, and counter-archives—we adopt a multi-sensory approach that emphasizes the tactile, the sonic, and the olfactory as modes of both enacting and resisting imperial desires. A decolonial sensorium, this course wagers, attunes us to empire’s failures to inscribe matter, flesh, pixels, ripples, beats, cries, and scars into systems of meaning, and thus opens new, insurgent spaces for feeling, hearing, thinking, and being. The role of vision and visuality in the sensuous life of race and empire has been well-examined. In shifting the focus to imperial and counter-imperial textures, surfaces, sounds, and scents, this course explores a wider array of sensory regimes and subject-object relations. How do the textures of objects such as mammy figurines, silks, and cake mixes materialize imperial fantasies? What happens to our idea of the human subject when we encounter it at the level of skin, hair, flesh, musculature, and other of its seemingly inalienable or eminently disposable components? How might we hear the sounds of Creole and Black vernacular speech and music against the grain of colonial inscriptive practices and technologies? In terms of method, the thinkers whom we engage throughout the term cut across a range of disciplines, genres, and media. Although many of our readings are “about” materiality, we also attend to how each text evokes and enacts materiality and the labors of the senses. Formerly ENGL 398.
EVST 060 (20898)
Topics in Environmental Justice
Michael Fotos
TTh 1:00-2:15pm
Areas SO, WR
This seminar introduces students to key concepts in environmental justice and to a selection of cases representing a wide range of environmental dilemmas. Course readings and discussions impart awareness of the diverse contexts in which problems of environmental justice might be studied, whether historical, geographic, racial, social, economic, political, biological, geophysical, or epistemic. Enrollment limited to first-year students.
EVST 349 / HSHM 449 / HIST 449J / HUMS 446 / URBN 382 (20370)
Critical Data Visualization: History, Theory, and Practice
Bill Rankin
T 1:30-3:20pm
Areas HU
Critical analysis of the creation, use, and cultural meanings of data visualization, with emphasis on both the theory and the politics of visual communication. Seminar discussions include close readings of historical data graphics since the late eighteenth century and conceptual engagement with graphic semiology, ideals of objectivity and honesty, and recent approaches of feminist and participatory data design. Course assignments focus on the research, production, and workshopping of students’ own data graphics; topics include both historical and contemporary material. No prior software experience is required; tutorials are integrated into weekly meetings. Basic proficiency in standard graphics software is expected by the end of the term, with optional support for more advanced programming and mapping software.
HSHM 425 / HIST 427J (21865)
Science Fiction and Prediction: Histories of Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Future
Elizabeth O’Neil
Day/Time TBA
Areas HU, WR
Climate catastrophe. AI Singularity. Viral mutation. Mars colonization. Everywhere you look today, scientists, journalists, and regular social media users are making predictions about the future. Throughout this course, we take a historical approach to how scientists and science fiction writers have tried to predict the future – or bring about a better one – using the rhetoric and cultural authority of science. Embracing the fuzzy boundaries of between science fiction and science prediction, we survey a variety of speculative utopian plans, dystopian nightmares, and apocalyptic visions of the future, along with secondary literature from historians and scholars of literature. How and why have scientists and scientific ideas been imagined as resources for solving social problems? How can we use predictions about the future to understand the past? This seminar appeals to students interested in the history of science and medicine, literature, politics, technology, and environmental studies.
HIST 156J (22459)
Capitalism, Labor, & Class Politics in Modern U.S.
Jennifer Klein
M 3:30-5:20pm
Areas HU, WR
History of American capitalism from the mid-19th century through the 21st century. This course examines different modes of capitalist accumulation and creation of landscapes, territories, boundaries. Readings address how regionalism, race, and class power shaped the development of American capitalism. We consider the continuum of free and coerced labor well after the end of slavery in the U.S. We read about indigenous communities, the environment, energy politics, and on-going struggles with the state. This mix of labor history, social theory, intellectual history, business history, social history, and geography also impel us to imagine the workings of American capitalism beyond the borders of the nation—to think about how capitalists and workers move through space and reshape space; the exchange of workers, ideas, technologies, and resources across national, imperial, and oceanic boundaries.
HIST 158J (22522)
Urban America in Turmoil and Transformation, 1975–Present
Instructor TBA
W 3:30-5:20pm
Areas HU, WR
For the past half century, America’s cities have been the epicenter of crisis, confrontation, and change. From health to housing, education to entertainment, and labor to law-and-order, cities–and the people who inhabit them–have been both subjects and participants in public debates about what it means to live in modern America. While some cities became larger, more diverse, and more prosperous, others grew older, poorer, and more homogenous. Most of them fought costly drug wars, just as they bore the brunt of national economic restructuring brought on by deindustrialization and federal disinvestment. This class investigates these local and national stories, uncovering the historical roots of the vexing challenges that continue to face American cities and their citizens today. Students have the opportunity to build from classroom discussions by developing a final original research project on a topic of their choosing.
HIST 417 / HSHM 220 / AFST 220 (23118)
Histories of Confinement: From Atlantic Slavery to Social Distancing
Instructor TBA
MW 2:30-3:20pm
Areas HU
This course looks closely at the history of asylums, hospitals, prisons, and schools. It seeks to understand their workings and the interplay between bureaucratic forms, spatial and material organization, and modes of discipline, control, and remediation. It asks, how is institutional power organized, displayed, deployed, and disputed, and what are the limits and contradictions inherent in these efforts? Our readings draw from a range of contexts and disciplines to consider the relationship between the built environment and institutional life.
HSAR 457 (23119)
Japanese Gardens
Mimi Yiengpruksawan
W 9:25-11:15am
Areas HU
Arts and theory of the Japanese garden with emphasis on the role of the anthropogenic landscape from aesthetics to environmental precarity, including the concept of refugium. Case studies of influential Kyoto gardens from the 11th through 15th centuries, and their significance as cultural productions with ecological implications.
HSAR 467 (22344)
Rethinking Andean Landscapes
Catalina Ospina
M 1:30-3:20pm
This seminar reflects on the diverse ways in which different groups in South America, from the pre-Hispanic to the colonial period, articulated their relationship to the landscape. Many distinct cultures adapted to lush Amazonian forests, extreme altitudes of the Andes Mountains, parched desert coasts in the Pacific, and freezing Pacific waters. In order to survive, these civilizations developed unique relationships with the landscape and its resources, such as potatoes, coca leaves, marine life, cotton, alpaca, and metals like silver, gold, and copper. These relationships were significantly transformed by the arrival of the Spanish, resulting in social upheaval, religious conversion, new economies, the development of hybrid artistic styles, and ecological catastrophes. Our goal is to think critically about the kinds of objects and discourses we have to interrogate Andean relationships to the landscape.
SPAN 230 / EVST 229 / ER&M 287 / LAST 226 (23072)
Reading Environments: Nature, Culture, and Agency
Luna Najera
Day/Time TBA
Areas HU, LA (5)
Extreme weather, proliferation of species extinctions, climate migration, and the outbreak of pandemics can all be understood as instances of koyaanisqatsi, the Hopi word for life out of balance. They may also be viewed as indications that we are living in the age of the Anthropocene, a term in the natural and social sciences that acknowledges that human activities have had a radical geological impact on the planet since the onset of the Industrial revolution. In this course we study relations between humans and other-than-humans to understand how we arrived at a life out of balance. We inquire into how binary distinctions between nature and culture are made, sustained, or questioned through a diversity of meaning-making practices in Spanish, Latin American, and indigenous literature, visual culture, and material culture. The indigenous artifacts studied include Popol Vuh, poetry, petroglyphs, and documentaries by indigenous people of the Amazon, which provide opportunities for asking pressing questions: To what extent does the nature and culture binary foreclose alternative possibilities for imagining ourselves and our relation to the world? Are there ways of perceiving our world and ourselves that bypass such binaries and if so, what are they? In the final weeks of the course, we draw from our insights to investigate where the nature/culture binary figures in present discussions of environmental catastrophes and rights of nature movements in Latin America. Taught in Spanish. Prerequisite: SPAN 140 or 145, or in accordance with placement results.
URBN 352 (22944)
Urban Lab: Citymaking and Food
Jacob Koch
F 1:00-4:00pm
Areas SO
Food is an unusual issue for city governments and an everyday issue for people: we all have to eat. What we eat, where it is purchased, how it is prepared, the ways food is grown, processed, distributed, and how we dispose of it–these are all parts of the ‘food system’. This Urban Lab explores the food system through its many points of interaction with city government and the built environment. Engaging locally with food policy in and around New Haven, this Urban Lab embraces the illegible aspects of cities and resists looking at the city as a fixed concept. Rather, we approach the city as a site of ongoing processes–citymaking and policymaking as iterative, contested, and multi-sectoral practices playing out over generations and across political administrations. Beyond the local food system, we also look at global trends and Federal-level policies in food policy. The lab focuses on developing methods of relevance to the practice of urbanism, including site visits to develop a shared way of seeing, data gathering, documentation, and mapping with work critiqued collectively, and the use of non-academic documents.