Required for : Elective

Typical Semester : Fall

Typically Taught By : Patrick Baur / Melva Treviño

 Examines environmental issues through political and economic lenses.

 This seminar is designed to give graduate students in environmental and life sciences an interdisciplinary foundation in the social science dimensions of your discipline(s) and topic(s) through an introduction to the field of political ecology. Political ecology “seeks to unravel the political forces at work in environmental access, management, and transformation” (Robbins, 2019, p. 3). Over the past five decades, this field has emerged as an “expansive, eclectic and inclusive” (Blaikie, 2007) response to the social-ecological complexity of environmental problems. Influenced by a range of academic disciplines—geography, anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental economics, forestry, and political science, to name a few—political ecology provides an idiosyncratic lens into the fraught relationships among human activities and natural processes, particularly at the intersection of ecology with flows of wealth and power. This diverse field is united by a shared commitment to reintroduce questions of justice, sovereignty, reciprocity, and the common good into otherwise apolitical discourses about human use of the environment and natural resources and their accompanying explanations for environmental degradation and justifications for intervention. This course is designed for graduate students working in various disciplines and with diverse research objectives. It is especially suited for graduate students interested in interdisciplinary approaches within their master’s or Ph.D. projects or collaborating with other scholars. Through exposure to political ecology applications in cases ranging from agriculture to marine protected areas and biodiversity conservation to bioengineering, students in this course will learn to apply a political ecology lens to formulating research questions and study design.