This course introduces students to important contemporary case studies and pressing global scenarios in the interdisciplinary field of nature-culture-sustainability studies. Readings examine varied configurations of land, people, environment, animals, and climate across nations and cultures. Each week of the course engages with issues of difference and diversity. The course will be of interest to those researching forms of capitalism, economic and social inequality, gender relations, identity politics, human-animal studies, ethics, and political struggle in relationship to land, territory, environment, and urbanism. NCSS-702G expands, extends, and resituates the foundational theoretical texts studied in NCSS-700G by asking students to read authors who have applied the work of NCSS-700G authors as lenses for engaging and understanding issues of global importance. As a required course in the first semester of the NCSS MA degree, the course creates a common vocabulary and experience for all NCSS MA students. The course can also be taken as a stand - alone seminar by non-major graduate students. Run as a seminar, students will complete weekly readings, regular writing assignments, and will engage weekly in class discussion.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Major Requirement | MA Nature-Cultures-Sustainability Studies

This course introduces students to important contemporary case studies and pressing global scenarios in the interdisciplinary field of nature-culture-sustainability studies. Readings examine varied configurations of land, people, environment, animals, and climate across nations and cultures. Each week of the course engages with issues of difference and diversity. The course will be of interest to those researching forms of capitalism, economic and social inequality, gender relations, identity politics, human-animal studies, ethics, and political struggle in relationship to land, territory, environment, and urbanism. NCSS-702G expands, extends, and resituates the foundational theoretical texts studied in NCSS-700G by asking students to read authors who have applied the work of NCSS-700G authors as lenses for engaging and understanding issues of global importance. As a required course in the first semester of the NCSS MA degree, the course creates a common vocabulary and experience for all NCSS MA students. The course can also be taken as a stand - alone seminar by non-major graduate students. Run as a seminar, students will complete weekly readings, regular writing assignments, and will engage weekly in class discussion.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Major Requirement | MA Nature-Cultures-Sustainability Studies

Designers and architects are constantly making objects, systems, services, infrastructures but they are also involved in dream making, desire shaping and negotiating power relations. The aim of this class is to introduce students in an accessible way to the wide-ranging insights that a sociology of design and architecture offers for understanding and evaluating the contours of our current designed economies and possible future designed worlds. We will explore design and architecture as forms of classed, raced and gendered labor and look at the tensions that have long existed between professional designers and publics. We will consider the ways in which the mainstream design industry is shaped by and a shaper of politics and culture and consider how it is embedded within and maintains markets, fossil capitalism, consumer culture and colonialism. We will appraise what sociologists and design theorists have to say about possible future design economies and societies based on digital surveillance, automation/robotics, and bio/geo-engineering. Finally, we will critically examine at a range of critical design social movements: from design justice to decolonial designers, feminist designers to designs for decarbonization and sustainable transitions which argue more just and ecological design worlds are still possible. 

Prerequisite: HPSS-S101 for Undergraduate Students

Elective

Designers and architects are constantly making objects, systems, services, infrastructures but they are also involved in dream making, desire shaping and negotiating power relations. The aim of this class is to introduce students in an accessible way to the wide-ranging insights that a sociology of design and architecture offers for understanding and evaluating the contours of our current designed economies and possible future designed worlds. We will explore design and architecture as forms of classed, raced and gendered labor and look at the tensions that have long existed between professional designers and publics. We will consider the ways in which the mainstream design industry is shaped by and a shaper of politics and culture and consider how it is embedded within and maintains markets, fossil capitalism, consumer culture and colonialism. We will appraise what sociologists and design theorists have to say about possible future design economies and societies based on digital surveillance, automation/robotics, and bio/geo-engineering. Finally, we will critically examine at a range of critical design social movements: from design justice to decolonial designers, feminist designers to designs for decarbonization and sustainable transitions which argue more just and ecological design worlds are still possible. 

Prerequisite: HPSS-S101 for Undergraduate Students

Elective

Topics in History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences is an introductory course in which students are encouraged to develop the skills in critical thinking, reading, and writing that are common to the disciplines represented in the Department of History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (HPSS). Sections focus on the topics typically addressed within the department's disciplines; through discussion about key texts and issues, students are introduced to important disciplinary methodologies and controversies. All sections have frequent writing assignments, which, combined with substantial feedback from HPSS faculty, afford students the opportunity to develop the strategies and techniques of effective writing. There are no waivers for HPSS-S101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year students should check the Registrar's Office website for topics.

Transfer and upper-level students should register for one of the evening sections.

Major Requirement | BFA

Topics in History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences is an introductory course in which students are encouraged to develop the skills in critical thinking, reading, and writing that are common to the disciplines represented in the Department of History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (HPSS). Sections focus on the topics typically addressed within the department's disciplines; through discussion about key texts and issues, students are introduced to important disciplinary methodologies and controversies. All sections have frequent writing assignments, which, combined with substantial feedback from HPSS faculty, afford students the opportunity to develop the strategies and techniques of effective writing. There are no waivers for HPSS-S101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year students should check the Registrar's Office website for topics.

Transfer and upper-level students should register for one of the evening sections.

Major Requirement | BFA

This course is a collaborative Brown/RISD course which will be co-taught by professors at Brown and RISD. Please note, the course will take place at Brown and follow Brown's Spring semester start and end dates (Thursday Jan 25, 2024 - Thursday May 2 2024)
 
The just transition is a foundational concept for labor-environmentalism and it has generated a range of productive debates between labor, feminist, environmental justice, indigenous forces and other actors about the possibilities, genuine dilemmas and trade-offs that confront all attempts to think through the challenge of decarbonization. Following the incorporation of the term “just transition” into the preamble to the Paris Agreement in 2015 at COP 21, it has also taken on a further life of its own in the international climate space as many leading climate NGOs, business elites and international unions articulate their commitment to decarbonization through the language of just transitions. This course seeks to build a reconstructive environmental sociology of the just transition, incorporating debates from political ecology, energy/technology studies, critical art and design studies and the climate social sciences. We will analyze, unpack and debate the merits of green capitalist and post-capitalist, socio-centric and technocentric visions of the transition away from fossil fuels. We will explore the different manifestations of just transitions in the global North and South, in terms of calls for green new deals, just sustainabilities, buen vivir and other frames. We will consider the considerable range of political, technological, cultural and other obstacles that stand in the way of realizing just transitions and reflect on the role that art, design and politics might make to furthering just transitions. 
 
This seminar will allow for 20 Brown students to register through Brown, and 15 RISD students to register through RISD.
 

Prerequisite: HPSS-S101 for Undergraduate Students

Elective