Geographic Perspectives on Political Ecology

This course will provide an introduction to political ecology, an important area of human geography since the 1980s. Political ecology offers a framework for understanding, critically analyzing, and rethinking explanations of human impacts on the environment. For political ecologists, environmental change results from uneven access to resources, and hence from power relations. In this course we will use the framework of political ecology and key concepts from human geography (scale, context, space, place, situated knowledge, spatial diffusion) to write about the production and spread of knowledge, discourse, and explanations of environmental issues and conflicts over resources. 3 hr. sem.