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

You may register for this section if your EFS studio days are Tuesday/Thursday/Friday.

We are in the midst of an ecological and climate crisis. Could cities and our urban worlds become key spaces for solutions? The aim of this course is to sociologically examine the past, present and future relations between ‘cities’, urbanization and nature; to introduce students to urban political ecology as a sociological methodology for exploring urban environments and to encourage empirical, normative and imaginative reflection on the possibilities (and potential dangers) that lie behind discourses of ‘green urbanism’. Surveying an exciting range of cities across time and space and capture, we will explore the many dynamic relationships that cities have with their surrounding ecologies and non-human natures. We will examine how a diverse range of reconstructive discourses of urban sustainability, from techno-centric plans to re-engineer cities, to discussions of ‘urban environmental justice’, to utopian plans to facilitate new urban social ecologies are vying to shape the future of cities. Finally, we will consider what role art, design, architecture and planning, politics and policy might play in shaping the future of our eco-urban worlds.

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

Major Requirement | BFA

You may register for this section if your EFS studio days are Tuesday/Wednesday/Friday.

We are in the midst of an ecological and climate crisis. Could cities and our urban worlds become key spaces for solutions? The aim of this course is to sociologically examine the past, present and future relations between ‘cities’, urbanization and nature; to introduce students to urban political ecology as a sociological methodology for exploring urban environments and to encourage empirical, normative and imaginative reflection on the possibilities (and potential dangers) that lie behind discourses of ‘green urbanism’. Surveying an exciting range of cities across time and space and capture, we will explore the many dynamic relationships that cities have with their surrounding ecologies and non-human natures. We will examine how a diverse range of reconstructive discourses of urban sustainability, from techno-centric plans to re-engineer cities, to discussions of ‘urban environmental justice’, to utopian plans to facilitate new urban social ecologies are vying to shape the future of cities. Finally, we will consider what role art, design, architecture and planning, politics and policy might play in shaping the future of our eco-urban worlds.

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

Major Requirement | BFA