Course Overview
Drawing on Medical and Psychological Anthropology, students will explore a variety of ethnographic and historical accounts of how humans have experienced and are experiencing anthropogenic change and acute weather events.
A particular focus on eco-emotions will allow the students to analyze past and contemporary ways of confronting changing landscapes and accelerated environmental degradation influenced by industrialization and long-standing processes of human activity that result in patterns of vulnerabilities.
Students will engage with current anthropological debates that look at the connections between climate change and capitalism as connected to relationships of coloniality and continuing forms of racism (namely Anthroposcene and capitaloscene).
Students will learn about the ontological struggles of diverse communities as they overcome the complexities of climate change and environmental precarity and their sociopolitical significance in contexts of state-led and private conservationism and community-based mental health interventions.
We will focus on case studies that show indigenous and non-indigenous eco-emotions, questioning established psychological framings such as eco-anxiety and eco-grief.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course students will be able to
- Be informed with anthropological frameworks that center on the psychology of cultural experience of climate change and environmental precarity.
- Learn about qualitative methodologies that emphasize indigenous knowledge and practice in adapting to environmental vulnerabilities.
- Describe eco-emotions as part of the repertoire of responses to environmental precarity.
- Discuss eco-emotions in connection to broader sociopolitical processes, including environmental colonialism.
- Analyze case studies that account for the lived experience of climate change.
- Develop research skills and organization of primary sources by completing an individual project.
Acknowledgment of collaborations
This course and its title are based on collaborative scholarship with colleagues who are engaging in these discussions through various lenses and methodologies. Our work will take the form of an edited volume called "How Does Climate Change Feel?" (to be published by the University of Colorado Press).