SDG Detail

F&ES 878 Climate and Society: Past to Present

Postgraduate course

Project description

Seminar on the major traditions of thought�both historic and contemporary�regarding climate, climate change, and society, drawing on the social sciences and anthropology in particular. Section I, overview of the field and course. Section II, continuities from past to present: use of differences in climate to explain differences among people; differences between Western and non-Western intellectual traditions; and the ethnographic study of folk knowledge. Section III, impact on society of environmental change: environmental determinism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; attribution of historic cases of societal �collapse� to extreme climatic events; and the role of extreme events in the development of a society. Section IV, vulnerability and control: how societies cope with extreme climatic events; and how such events reflect, reveal, and reproduce socioeconomic fault lines. Section V, knowledge and its circulation: construction of knowledge of climate and its extremes; and contesting of knowledge between central and local authorities and between the global North and South. The main texts, The Anthropology of Climate Change and Climate Cultures, were written especially for this course. Two-hour lecture/seminar.