Geographies of Nature, Power, and Society

This course provides an introduction to the contributions of human geography to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology. Political ecology offers a framework for understanding and critically rethinking explanations of human interactions with the environment, working toward equitable and sustainable solutions. For political ecologists, environmental change and social conflict result from uneven access to resources, and hence from power relations. Human geographers contribute concepts of scale, space, place, spatial interactions, and situated knowledge. We will integrate concepts from both fields to study human-environment interactions, and to analyze the production of knowledge and discourses about environmental problems. 3 hr. sem.