Course Description
This course provides an overview of social science approaches to environmental issues. As a required course for the environmental studies major, the course takes a problem-based and topical approach to the study of interactions between society and the environment. Students in the course will learn how the different social sciences (e.g., anthropology, geography, history, psychology, political science, economics) approach, investigate, and answer questions related to human-environment relations. The course’s content addresses significant environmental issues relating to society’s utilization of natural resources, the environmental pollution created by society, and society’s efforts to create a more “sustainable” future. Important institutional, market, demographic, and political dynamics that are relevant to these issues will be covered, as will concepts such as sustainable development, environmental justice, indigenous knowledge, sustainability paradigms, the tragedy of the commons, and environmental externalities. We will also begin to build an understanding of how intersecting social positions shape human-environment relations, with the understanding that who we are shapes how we come to know act within and towards the environment.
Throughout the semester, students will work in groups to develop individual research project proposals related to human-environment relations from the social scientific perspective of their choice. A fundamental part of this course is to read broadly across some of the disciplines that make up the environmental social sciences, to understand their similarities and differences, and to understand how different social scientists might study questions related to human-environment relations differently. We will also look at some of the ways in which social scientists have contributed to the (re)production of structural violence, racism, misogyny, and classism, while also potentially exacerbating the very environmental problems they hoped to resolve.
Because this is also a core course in the Environmental Studies Department, this course should also serve to introduce you to the major and minor, while providing academic and professional development. As such, we will be working on producing college, class, and personal goals and keeping each other accountable for achieving a healthy work-life balance and steps towards utilizing the resources at Davidson College to help you succeed as a student as well as in your life post-Davidson. The college, class, and personal goals worksheet that we will fill out will hopefully serve as a living document to help you think about how you might map out your semester so that you can actively work towards being successful academically, professionally, and personally, according to how you define success.
This is a survey course that will introduce students to the breadth of research approaches and topics within the environmental social sciences. It also serves as a foundation for more advanced courses offered by the environmental studies department. It will not, nor should it, serve as a substitute for introductory courses in specific social science departments. Instead, it is designed so that students can gain a sense of how the social sciences, as a whole, have approached the study of the environment, their similarities and differences in terms of their theoretical and methodological orientations, and their debates and conflicts.
Students interested in pursuing environmental studies as a major will also be required to take ENV 201: Environmental Science and ENV 203: Environmental Humanities to gain a breadth of approaches for the study of the environment. This course fulfills one of the three core requirements for the major.
The course will be structured into four (4) units:
- Introduction to the Environmental Social Sciences: The Anthropocene, Epistemological orientations within the SS, Asking Social Science Research Questions, the Environmental Social Sciences track at Davidson College.
- Theories and Applications of the Environmental Social Sciences: Population and resources; markets and valuation; institutions and environmental governance; ecological ethics and philosophy.
- Syntheses, or Bringing it back full circle: So, what are the Environmental Social Sciences?
- Class Celebrations
- Teacher: Jessica Worl