ANTH 479 B: Advanced Topics in Medical Anthropology

How do people feel, interpret, and live with climate change?

This seminar explores climate change not only as an environmental crisis, but as a deeply human one—shaping emotions, identities, social relations, and struggles for justice.

Students will learn how diverse communities around the world experience and respond to environmental precarity, from slow ecological degradation to acute weather events. We will examine the ontological struggles that emerge as people confront loss, uncertainty, and change, paying close attention to how these struggles intersect with state-led and private conservation projects, community-based mental health initiatives, and broader political and economic forces.

Drawing on Medical and Psychological Anthropology, the course centers ethnographic and historical accounts that show how climate change is lived, interpreted, and contested. A key focus will be on eco-emotions—such as anxiety, grief, hope, and resilience—and how these emotional responses are shaped by colonial histories, capitalism, and ongoing forms of racial and environmental inequality.

Throughout the seminar, students will engage with major anthropological debates about climate change, including the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, and critically examine how climate crisis is connected to coloniality, extraction, and global capitalism.

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

1. Apply anthropological frameworks that center the psychological and cultural experience of climate change and environmental precarity.
2. Understand qualitative and ethnographic methodologies, with particular attention to Indigenous knowledge and practices for adapting to environmental vulnerability.
3. Identify and describe eco-emotions as key responses to climate change and ecological uncertainty.
4. Analyze eco-emotions in relation to power, including environmental colonialism, racism, and uneven responsibility for climate harm.
5. Interpret ethnographic case studies that document the lived, everyday experience of climate change across different communities.
6. Develop independent research skills by designing and completing an individual project using primary and ethnographic sources.

Course Format & Assessment

This is a discussion‑based seminar focused on critical reading, writing, and dialogue.

• Assessments include: essays, independent research, and presentations
• No in‑class exams